Sonnet 92: But Do Thy Worst to Steal Thyself Away
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But do thy worst to steal thyself away,
For term of life thou art assured mine, And life no longer than thy love will stay, For it depends upon that love of thine. Then need I not to fear the worst of wrongs, When in the least of them my life hath end: I see a better state to me belongs Than that which on thy humour doth depend. Thou canst not vex me with inconstant mind, Since that my life on thy revolt doth lie; O what a happy title do I find: Happy to have thy love, happy to die. But what's so blessed fair that fears no blot: Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not. |
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But do thy worst to steal thyself away,
For term of life thou art assured mine, |
The argument follows on from Sonnet 91, which suggested that William Shakespeare is happier, more privileged, more blessed than any other man, because he has the young man's love, but then led out and onto this sonnet with the couplet which conceded that he is:
Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take All this away, and me most wretched make. And so here, Shakespeare continues: but try as hard as you like to steal yourself away from me, you are pledged to me for life... 'Do thy worst', as editors like to point out, plays on the idiomatic phrase 'do your best to do whatever it is that you intend to do', meaning 'do what you can to achieve the desired result', but here inverts this to also echo the similarly idiomatic phrase: 'do your worst', to mean 'do as much damage as you can'. Because of this inversion it suggests a potential intentionality on the part of the young man to do harm or damage, or at any rate to wrong Shakespeare by being untruthful or unfaithful to him, and this ties in strongly with the meaning of "For term of life thou art assured mine." This is not the first time in these sonnets that we hear William Shakespeare employ the language of marriage when talking about his relationship with the young man – he did so in Sonnet 74 and in Sonnet 82 – and it won't be the last – he will do so most famously in Sonnet 116. And he's doing so here, because 'to be assured' to someone means, and is used by Shakespeare himself in his plays to say, that someone is promised, betrothed, or committed to somebody else. You will find an example of this in The Comedy of Errors, where, in Act III, Scene 2, one of the Dromios says: ...this drudge or diviner laid claim to me, called me Dromio, swore I was assured to her... And in King John, Act II, Scene 1, where Austria on the point of being married uses the word both in its more ordinary sense and in the sense of being betrothed: And your lips too, for I am well assured That I did so when I was first assured. This, together with the assertion that the young man is thus 'assured' to Shakespeare 'for term of life', which directly echos the idea of 'till death us do part' therefore once again strongly suggests that either the young man has given Shakespeare such an undertaking of being committed to him 'for term of life', or that, at any rate, Shakespeare believes to have been given such an undertaking. |
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And life no longer than thy love will stay,
For it depends upon that love of thine. |
...and my life will not stay with me or last any longer than your love, because it depends on this love of yours in order to continue.
This is straightforward enough: my life depends on your love, if your love ends, my life ends. |
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Then need I not to fear the worst of wrongs,
When in the least of them my life hath end: |
And so because of this, I need not fear the worst thing that could happen to me – which, as we know from Sonnet 90, is you leaving me – or the worst wrong, as in injustice, that could be done to me – which, in light of you being 'assured mine' 'for term of life' would also be you leaving me – because even the slightest indication from you that you do not love me any more, or, more specifically, of a wrong you might be doing me, for example by being unfaithful to me, would immediately cause my life to come to an end.
Editors also refer to the first line of the poem, 'But do thy worst to steal thyself away," which does, of course, reinforce the idea that the worst thing that can happen to Shakespeare is the young man leaving him, but this has in fact been established much more clearly and more forcefully two sonnets ago. |
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I see a better state to me belongs
Than that which on thy humour doth depend. |
I can see or I realise that there is a better condition or state of being that belongs to me than one which depends entirely on your whim or your mood, which is of course influenced by your temperament, which, as we saw at length in the previous sonnet, is determined by your humours or rather more specifically by the humour which dominates your character at any given time.
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Thou canst not vex me with inconstant mind,
Since that my life on thy revolt doth lie; |
You cannot trouble or distress me with your fickleness and by changing your mind about me, because my life is tied to your love and so any change of heart of yours will instantly impact on my life as follows:
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O what a happy title do I find:
Happy to have thy love, happy to die. |
Oh, what a happy or fortunate state do I find myself in, because I am either happy, as in lucky and full of joy, to have your love, or relieved from all worry and sadness and therefore happy to be dead, which will be the case at the slightest hint of you withdrawing your love from me.
There is a strong possibility that Shakespeare here – as he does every so often – is playing with words to draw attention to wordplay. We've noted before that he is apt at highlighting the fact that something is happening within his language by doing something unusual with the language, and the repetition of 'happy' here is nothing if not eye-catching, delivering, as it does, three different meanings: happy to mean 'fortunate', happy to mean 'lucky' or 'joyful' and happy to mean 'free from sadness'. And one obvious and fitting wordplay he may well be drawing attention to is the double meaning of both 'have thy love', which can be read as 'have you' in a sexual way, and 'to die' which is a standard Elizabethan euphemism for 'to orgasm'. 'Title' here means a legal right of ownership, which aligns itself with the notion that Shakespeare considers the young man to be 'assured' his 'for term of life'. We have come across it in this sense before, in Sonnet 46. |
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But what's so blessed fair that fears no blot:
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The 'that' to us suggests a causality, in the sense of, 'what could be so beautiful that it does not, as a result of being so beautiful, need to fear some blot'. But it can also be understood to mean 'which', so the line reads, 'what is there in the world which can be so blessed, so perfect, so beautiful as you are and does not at the same time have to be afraid of a stain on this perfection, of some sort of blemish that could damage it'. And this reading to my mind is somewhat stronger, though both may of course be intended. Whereby in the second interpretation of the line, the 'fears' – and this is also not entirely usual in Shakespeare – is then projected from the thing itself onto the poet, because:
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Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not.
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You may in fact be false to me, meaning unfaithful, and betray me with other people, and I don't know about it. Which is why I, the poet, have to fear all the time that you, this piece of perfection, may in one way or another be stained with a blot.
This suggests two things at once: firstly, that the young man has reassured or is reassuring Shakespeare that he is being faithful to him, and secondly that Shakespeare doesn't think he can trust him that he is fearing this 'blot' on the young lover's perfection. Something which is hardly news to us by now, as it happens. You will find editors also referring the first line of this couplet – "But what's so blessed fair that fears no blot" – to the happy state Shakespeare says he finds himself in, but that actually really seems rather unlikely and is also not strictly necessary, since the second line makes it abundantly clear that Shakespeare – who has established his young lover as blessed and fair beyond doubt – is here referring to him. |
Sonnet 92 continues from Sonnet 91 and sets out a compelling – if perhaps strictly speaking somewhat sophistic – argument why the young man may, as the previous sonnet in its closing couplet considered to be a distinct possibility, leave Shakespeare whenever he feels like it, but without in doing so actually making him, Shakespeare, most wretched as a result, as the same sonnet also suggested would be the case.
This sonnet thus appears to contradict the consequence to the poet of a breakup put forward by Sonnet 91, but the ostensible options it offers for his happiness are stark: I can be happy because you love me or because I am dead. Like Sonnet 91, though, this poem too weaves the thread of thought further and leads into Sonnet 93 as the third part of the argumentation and in doing so it ushers in a rather radical change in tone which will become increasingly pronounced in the two poems that then follow, Sonnets 94 and 95.
By some margin the most fascinating development in Sonnet 92 is William Shakespeare invoking his 'title' in the young man. This, in both stance and tone, and indeed in the general positioning of the poem in the context of their relationship, is bold indeed. The sonnet unequivocally states: "For term of life thou art assured mine." This does not, of course, mean that the young man sees it the same way, it does not even really mean that the young man has necessarily given Shakespeare any good reason for thinking that he has committed himself to him, but as far as Will is concerned, there really is no doubt: we two are one, we belong together, for life.
Bold, even brazen, as this is, it is not actually new. Take Sonnet 22:
Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain
Thou gavest me thine, not to give back again.
Sonnet 25:
Then happy I that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove, nor be removed.
Sonnet 42:
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one
There have been plenty of occasions when all of this was in doubt, when there were ups and downs and strains and stresses on this love, as we have seen, and it would be tedious here to list them all, but not for the first time now William Shakespeare asserts that as far as he is concerned, he and his young man belong together and, as he put it in one of the sonnets that in fact highlighted and tried to deal with a crisis, Sonnet 36: 'our undivided loves are one'.
This begs the question, of course; is our poet delusional? Is this happening only in his wishful thinking and is it actually the case that the young man has never so much as indicated that he is similarly devoted to Will, as Will is to him? That is a possibility.
What speaks against it though is not just the force of these pronouncements and the conviction with which they are stated – this could easily enough be just the sign of the sixteenth century equivalent of a stalker – but most particularly the fact that Shakespeare is writing all of this to a young man who really could make his life rather difficult if these were but the outpourings of a one-sided infatuation.
Also, as we have seen and noted, the relationship is not purely a private matter. Sonnet 36 with its fully acknowledged fear of censure clearly attests to this, and we also discussed this public aspect most recently with Sonnet 89, and so while it is possible, in theory, that all of this love and this devotion, this commitment and this experience, only ever happens in Shakespeare's mind, the theory is really specious. By this time, with close to a century of sonnets under our belt, we have sufficient grounds to reiterate, and with confirmed confidence, that these poems are the product of a real-life, and to at least some appreciable extent reciprocal, relationship.
And if we accept this to be the case, then this sonnet, particularly when read – as it must be – in its position as the bridge between Sonnet 91 and Sonnet 93, is quite astoundingly revealing: we go from an expression of how much your love means to me compared to all these other things that might matter to someone, with that someone very possibly not being just a raft of other people but you yourself, to accepting that you may take this love away from me, to reminding you that if you do so you do in fact betray me. And that by necessity means that you go against what, in words or in deed or in both, you have promised.
We know – not least from Sonnet 73 which spells it out for us with its devastating closing line "To love that well which thou must leave ere long" – that Shakespeare may be a fool for love but he is no fool: he is as conscious as we are of the fact that this commitment he may have or believe to have cannot actually last forever, certainly not as an exclusive, monogamous partnership in the way we might today view a same-sex relationship, but he very clearly views not only himself as committed entirely to the young man, but understands the young man to be equally committed to him, and lest we might think we are perhaps reading too much into this, Shakespeare in Sonnet 93 also spells out for us how he would view himself if it turned out that his young lover were betraying him behind his back: he would feel and live like "a deceived husband."
What Sonnet 92 also does, of course – if that were necessary – is confirm that the young man is fickle: you do not need to tell your lover that he can't vex you with 'inconstant mind' if there is not a real possibility that he may be changing his mind about you, about how much or how little he returns your feelings, about what you mean to him. It would be either extremely insulting or roundly paranoid to do so, and there have been so many signs by now that the young man has been unfaithful already and is prone to have "others all too near," as Sonnet 61 put it, for us not to need to entertain the possibility of Shakespeare fretting here over nothing. True enough: a person reiterating their anxiety about someone else's conduct does not make that other person's conduct real, but we have ample evidence throughout these sonnets, that Shakespeare's anxiety is based not purely on his insecurity and distrust, but on actual events; the famous triangular episode of Sonnets 33 through Sonnet 42 being the prime example of this so far: they do not talk about things that might happen or that Shakespeare fears, they talk about things that obviously did occur.
And it is worth keeping this 'so far' in mind, even just in the back of our mind: while we can't say for certain that these sonnets line up in a chronological order – and in fact as you know scholarly opinion tends to veer towards suggesting that there are at least some non-linear phases that are out of sequence – we are still not quite two thirds into assembling our collage of a picture. And there are some fairly fundamental developments yet to come, with their attendant revelations and surprises which will turn out to be deeply significant and which will serve to shift our perception of William Shakespeare and his loves in yet quite startling a fashion...
This sonnet thus appears to contradict the consequence to the poet of a breakup put forward by Sonnet 91, but the ostensible options it offers for his happiness are stark: I can be happy because you love me or because I am dead. Like Sonnet 91, though, this poem too weaves the thread of thought further and leads into Sonnet 93 as the third part of the argumentation and in doing so it ushers in a rather radical change in tone which will become increasingly pronounced in the two poems that then follow, Sonnets 94 and 95.
By some margin the most fascinating development in Sonnet 92 is William Shakespeare invoking his 'title' in the young man. This, in both stance and tone, and indeed in the general positioning of the poem in the context of their relationship, is bold indeed. The sonnet unequivocally states: "For term of life thou art assured mine." This does not, of course, mean that the young man sees it the same way, it does not even really mean that the young man has necessarily given Shakespeare any good reason for thinking that he has committed himself to him, but as far as Will is concerned, there really is no doubt: we two are one, we belong together, for life.
Bold, even brazen, as this is, it is not actually new. Take Sonnet 22:
Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain
Thou gavest me thine, not to give back again.
Sonnet 25:
Then happy I that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove, nor be removed.
Sonnet 42:
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one
There have been plenty of occasions when all of this was in doubt, when there were ups and downs and strains and stresses on this love, as we have seen, and it would be tedious here to list them all, but not for the first time now William Shakespeare asserts that as far as he is concerned, he and his young man belong together and, as he put it in one of the sonnets that in fact highlighted and tried to deal with a crisis, Sonnet 36: 'our undivided loves are one'.
This begs the question, of course; is our poet delusional? Is this happening only in his wishful thinking and is it actually the case that the young man has never so much as indicated that he is similarly devoted to Will, as Will is to him? That is a possibility.
What speaks against it though is not just the force of these pronouncements and the conviction with which they are stated – this could easily enough be just the sign of the sixteenth century equivalent of a stalker – but most particularly the fact that Shakespeare is writing all of this to a young man who really could make his life rather difficult if these were but the outpourings of a one-sided infatuation.
Also, as we have seen and noted, the relationship is not purely a private matter. Sonnet 36 with its fully acknowledged fear of censure clearly attests to this, and we also discussed this public aspect most recently with Sonnet 89, and so while it is possible, in theory, that all of this love and this devotion, this commitment and this experience, only ever happens in Shakespeare's mind, the theory is really specious. By this time, with close to a century of sonnets under our belt, we have sufficient grounds to reiterate, and with confirmed confidence, that these poems are the product of a real-life, and to at least some appreciable extent reciprocal, relationship.
And if we accept this to be the case, then this sonnet, particularly when read – as it must be – in its position as the bridge between Sonnet 91 and Sonnet 93, is quite astoundingly revealing: we go from an expression of how much your love means to me compared to all these other things that might matter to someone, with that someone very possibly not being just a raft of other people but you yourself, to accepting that you may take this love away from me, to reminding you that if you do so you do in fact betray me. And that by necessity means that you go against what, in words or in deed or in both, you have promised.
We know – not least from Sonnet 73 which spells it out for us with its devastating closing line "To love that well which thou must leave ere long" – that Shakespeare may be a fool for love but he is no fool: he is as conscious as we are of the fact that this commitment he may have or believe to have cannot actually last forever, certainly not as an exclusive, monogamous partnership in the way we might today view a same-sex relationship, but he very clearly views not only himself as committed entirely to the young man, but understands the young man to be equally committed to him, and lest we might think we are perhaps reading too much into this, Shakespeare in Sonnet 93 also spells out for us how he would view himself if it turned out that his young lover were betraying him behind his back: he would feel and live like "a deceived husband."
What Sonnet 92 also does, of course – if that were necessary – is confirm that the young man is fickle: you do not need to tell your lover that he can't vex you with 'inconstant mind' if there is not a real possibility that he may be changing his mind about you, about how much or how little he returns your feelings, about what you mean to him. It would be either extremely insulting or roundly paranoid to do so, and there have been so many signs by now that the young man has been unfaithful already and is prone to have "others all too near," as Sonnet 61 put it, for us not to need to entertain the possibility of Shakespeare fretting here over nothing. True enough: a person reiterating their anxiety about someone else's conduct does not make that other person's conduct real, but we have ample evidence throughout these sonnets, that Shakespeare's anxiety is based not purely on his insecurity and distrust, but on actual events; the famous triangular episode of Sonnets 33 through Sonnet 42 being the prime example of this so far: they do not talk about things that might happen or that Shakespeare fears, they talk about things that obviously did occur.
And it is worth keeping this 'so far' in mind, even just in the back of our mind: while we can't say for certain that these sonnets line up in a chronological order – and in fact as you know scholarly opinion tends to veer towards suggesting that there are at least some non-linear phases that are out of sequence – we are still not quite two thirds into assembling our collage of a picture. And there are some fairly fundamental developments yet to come, with their attendant revelations and surprises which will turn out to be deeply significant and which will serve to shift our perception of William Shakespeare and his loves in yet quite startling a fashion...
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!