Summary
Sonnet 30 is a love poem—but an unusual one. Instead of listing the beloved’s many attractive and virtuous qualities, the speaker lists all the heartbreaks and sorrows he has experienced in his own life. He brings these “woes” to mind because he knows this will eventually cause him to think of the “dear friend” whom he now loves. When the friend comes to mind, all his past pains are healed.
The poem describes a pattern of thinking. The speaker says that he sometimes chooses to “summon up remembrance of things past.” He plays this memory game during “sessions of sweet silent thought.” In the midst of this quiet mediation on the past, he becomes nostalgic for the absence of things after which he once chased: “I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.” This causes him to “wail,” or cry out, about the way time destroys the things one cares for.
The second stanza shows the result of the speaker’s experiment in memory. The poem is structured as an elaborate if-then statement. If he remembers things past and lost, then he can “drown an eye (unused to flow).” In other words, he makes himself cry by thinking about the past. Yet this is a speaker who is not used to drowning his eyes in tears. He summons up the past on purpose to make himself weep. What does he weep about? Dear friends who are hidden in the endless night that is death. Thinking of these friends allows him to “weep afresh love’s long since canceled woe.” He cries over long past heartbreak as if it has just freshly happened to him.
The third stanza continues the long if-then statement. If the speaker recalls the past, then he can also “grieve at grievances forgone”: he can mourn things that are already long over. He can also tell the tale of the many things he has “moan[ed]” over, tallying them all up. However, remembering all of this causes him to pay a heavy price. Recalling the sadness is even sadder than what he first felt when losing these things he loved.
If remembering the past is this painful, why does the speaker do it? The turn in the poem’s argument (called the “volta”) comes with the 13th line that starts the final couplet. “But if the while I think on thee (dear friend) / All losses are restored, and sorrows end.” In other words, if he thinks about his dear friend in the midst of this sad “remembrance of things past,” then he stops being sad altogether. It is as if all the things he lost are returned to him. This is how powerful the friend’s effect on the speaker is. The mere thought of the friend stops all sorrows.
Analysis
Sonnet 30 is a love poem in which the speaker describes his love indirectly. According to Shakespeare scholar Elizabeth Harris Sagaser, it is a poem about sorrows, but these sorrows are “in the service of proving the poet-lover’s love for his friend.” If even heavy “sighs,” “woes,” “moans,” and “grievances” can be canceled by the thought of the speaker’s “dear friend,” then this is a truly remarkable person. Yet the speaker makes himself sigh and moan on purpose. Sagaser describes it as a “thought exercise.” The speaker knows that if he makes himself remember the painful past, eventually this will bring the friend to mind. Thinking of the friend will then cause all these sorrows to disappear. It will be as if everything the speaker has lost in his life is returned to him.
The poem provides an emotional autobiography of the speaker. We learn that in the present he is stoic: calm and emotionless in the face of pain. His eye is “unused to flow” because he is not in the habit of crying over difficult things. Yet when the poem begins, it is clear that the speaker wants to make himself cry. “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past,” he says, “Then can I drown [my] eye.” Crying like this brings him back to an earlier period in his life, a painful one in which he lost friends, felt “woe,” and “moan[ed]” for things no longer in his life. In fact, the pain of these memories is so intense that he feels even worse than he did when they first happened. This is what the speaker means by “weep[ing] afresh love’s long since canceled woe” and paying the price for regret “as if not paid before.” The speaker has actually moved on from these things (at the very least, he does not cry over them anymore), but he chooses to trade his stoicism for sadness. He does this because he knows what the result of this thought experiment will be: if he remembers the past, then he will think of his friend. And if he thinks of his friend, all will be made right again. It is as if all the pain he has experienced in life was worth it for bringing him to this moment.
Though Sonnet 30 is about sorrow and love, it uses a number of motifs and metaphors from the realms of law and finance. Already in the first two lines, legal terms are used: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.” The word “sessions” here refers to the meeting of a court of law, as in the phrase “the court is in session.” Similarly, “to summon” means to be called to court, just as in today’s English one can be “summoned” to jury duty. It is as if the speaker’s internal realm of “sweet silent thought” is a kind of courtroom. Memories of “things past” are invited to the court as jurors or witnesses. The court then sets to work in weighing and measuring the difficult things that the speaker has experienced in his life.
This is where the financial language comes in. The speaker “weeps afresh love’s long since canceled woe.” Just as a debt can be canceled, the speaker has actually paid this emotional debt long before. Similarly, recalling the “account” (both a story and a bank account) of his earlier “moan[s]”, the speaker “new pay[s them] as if not paid before.” In another financial metaphor, the speaker “moan[s] th’expense of many a vanished sight.” These moans have cost the speaker: they are expensive in the sense that they came at a high emotional price. By the end of the third quatrain, the speaker is in ruin, both emotionally and financially. He is on the verge of bankruptcy. This is where the speaker’s friend comes in. When the speaker thinks about him, “all losses are restored.”
Yet for all of these complex motifs and metaphors, the central message of the sonnet is quite simple: pain and heartbreak can be worthwhile if they bring you to a happier present. It is to prove the happiness and love the speaker feels in the present that he recites all his past woes, even to the point of making himself cry. According to Sagaser, the speaker does this on purpose because he knows what the result will be: “The whole thought exercise rehearses what I would call the anguished thrill of survival, with its secret sacrifices: the necessity of the loss of earlier hopes and loves in order to have this love, the loss inherent in all love.” In this way, the sonnet narrates the speaker’s emotional development: from happiness to intense pain and loss, from there to a steely-eyed stoicism, and then finally newfound happiness through love. The message is that pain and loss are intimately connected to happiness and love. You cannot have one without the other.
