Pity me not because the light of day
Though this poem is centered around the speaker's troubles, it actually begins with an imperative asking her audience not to feel pity for her. This helps establish one of the tensions that drive the poem forward: the speaker is experiencing strong feelings, but she channels those feelings into a plea for others to minimize their response. This tension is only resolved in the poem's last lines, when she explains that she does indeed desire pity, but only in response to specific aspects of her situation. These opening lines also leave open multiple interpretations regarding audience. The speaker appears to be addressing a general listener, including the reader. Later, it also becomes clear that she is addressing one specific individual.
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by
Though images of nature occur throughout the poem, the work's early lines feature a specific type of nature imagery, exemplified by these lines. The types of natural phenomena highlighted here are gentle, pastoral, cyclical, and lovely. The types of sounds featured in these lines —F, S, TH, and Y sounds feature prominently—contribute to that mood by creating an impression of softness. By crafting such a peacefully plaintive mood and using these images as a metaphor for lost love, the speaker suggests that her loss is natural, expected, and sad in a quietly melancholic way.
Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.
The middle of the poem represents an important turning point. In these lines, the speaker's specific plight is revealed, and we understand that she is suffering from a romantic heartbreak. We also understand that the poem's addressee is a specific person—the source of that heartbreak. The speaker's philosophizing in the previous lines makes sense in a new way, since her ideas about nature's cycles (not to mention the melancholic mood) now are understandable as metaphors for the end of a relationship. Despite the speaker's attempt to minimize the impact of this loss by comparing it to a change in nature, these two middle lines are jarring, especially in their abrupt exposure of a "you." Just as the speaker's loss has surprised her against her better judgment, the discovery of that loss emerges in a way that is sudden and surprising to the reader.
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales:
In the poem's second half, the speaker ostensibly continues to make the same points she made earlier. She compares love to natural phenomena, just as she did before, specifically describing how both love and nature are variable, impermanent, and normal. But her tone changes dramatically in these lines, such that the natural processes she previously depicted as tranquilly beautiful are now full of violence. For instance, here, the verbs "tread" and "strew" are full of action and movement, while the nouns "gale" and "wreckage" evoke force, intensity, and destruction. This suggests that the speaker's emotions are less controlled than she wishes them to be, and that her internal experience is as stormy and violent as the images depicted here.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
In a Shakespearian sonnet like this one, the poem's final two lines generally present a witty or surprising revelation, casting the previous twelve lines in a new light. Here, the speaker quickly subverts the message of the first twelve lines, switching over from an ABAB rhyme scheme to a GG one to show that these two lines present an important shift. No longer arguing that she should not be pitied, she explains that she does indeed wish for sympathy, albeit sympathy directed in a very specific direction. By asserting that her reaction, rather than the situation to which she reacts, is cause for pity, she neatly splits her ex-lover's withdrawal of affection from her own feelings about it.
