Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reigns love and all love’s loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye
As interest of the dead, which now appear
But things removed that hidden in thee lie!
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is thine alone:
Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.
This expands the thought of the previous sonnet. On thinking of his friend, all sorrow for former loves vanishes. Now he supposes that this is because the parts of all the former lovers, and his share in them, is diverted and migrated into the heart of his beloved. Therefore there is no loss at all, for all is stored up within that one gentle heart, and his former love for others was but a prelude to the love he now feels for the youth, and the accumulated devotion he felt for them is now transferred to his beloved’s heart. (But there may also be sexual double entendres included to leaven the seriousness).
This sonnet is important because of its links to A Lover’s Complaint, especially the stanza
‘Lo! all these trophies of affections hot,
Of pensived and subdued desires the tender,
Nature hath charged me that I hoard them not,
But yield them up where I myself must render,
That is, to you, my origin and ender:
For these, of force, must your oblations be,
Since I their altar, you enpatron me. LC 218-224.
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