Shakespeare's Sonnet 31 is one of the numerous sonnets in his sequence addressed to a well-born young man. Developing an idea introduced at the end of Sonnet 30, this sonnet figures the young man's superiority in terms of the possession of all the love the speaker has ever experienced.

Paraphrase

You contain or possess all the loves of people that I, because I lacked them, supposed dead; love reigns in your heart, and all the parts of love, and all those friends I had thought dead. I used to cry as if at funerals, for people who appeared to be dead, when in fact those I thought dead had simply lodged with you. You are, indeed, like a grave where buried love is resurrected; you are hung with the trophies of my past love, and those past loves gave to you the parts of me that they once owned. The love I once owed to them is now due to you alone, and the loves I once had I now see in you, and you have all of me.

I give to you all the love I have ever known,
Which, having lost this love, it was as if dead;
So only in this netherworld existed my love, along with everything that sustains it,
Together with the dearest parts of myself which seemed lost forever.

Looking back, well-intentioned but wrongly did I waste
On a stale un-living that was not real love,
Paying with who I am for what seemed right, which now shows itself
To have been in you all along dormant and waiting for me!

You are my salvation,
I adorn you with all that I am and everything I have done,
You resurrect my love and it pledges itself to you,
What I gave everyone and so lost now is only yours.
Joyfully I now see it all living within you,
And you, we united, are my everything.

Source and analysis

Critics such as Malone

Edmond Malone

Edmond Malone was an Irish Shakespearean scholar and editor of the works of William Shakespeare.Assured of an income after the death of his father in 1774, Malone was able to give up his law practice for at first political and then more congenial literary pursuits. He went to London, where he...

, Collier

John Payne Collier

John Payne Collier , English Shakespearian critic and forger, was born in London.-Reporter and solicitor:...

, Dowden

Edward Dowden

Edward Dowden , was an Irish critic and poet.He was the son of John Wheeler Dowden, a merchant and landowner, and was born at Cork, three years after his brother John, who became Bishop of Edinburgh in 1886. Edward's literary tastes emerged early, in a series of essays written at the age of twelve...

 glossed "obsequious" as "funereal"; others have preferred the simpler "dutiful". The quarto

Quarto

Quarto could refer to:* Quarto, a size or format of a book in which four leaves of a book are created from a standard size sheet of paper* For specific information about quarto texts of William Shakespeare's works, see:...

's "there" in line 8 is generally amended to "thee," although certain critics have defended the quarto reading.

"Religious love" is frequently compared to a similar phrase used ironically in A Lover's Complaint

A Lover's Complaint

A Lover's Complaint is a narrative poem published as an appendix to the original edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. It is given the title 'A Lover's Complaint' in the book, which was published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609...

; G. Wilson Knight

G. Wilson Knight

George Richard Wilson Knight was an English literary critic and academic, known particularly for his interpretation of mythic content in literature, and his essays The Wheel of Fire on Shakespeare's drama...

 connects the phrase to a "suprapersonal reality created by love" in the sequence as a whole.

Numerous editors have placed a period after "give" in line 11. This practice, which is not universal, changes the "that" in line 12 from an abbreviated "so that" to a demonstrative

Demonstrative

In linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others...

; the advantage of this procedure is that it renders comprehensible the "due" in line 12.

T. W. Baldwin argued on thematic grounds that this poem should immediately follow Sonnet 20

Sonnet 20

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 was published in a collection of 154 sonnets in the early seventeenth century. This particular sonnet is infamously known and widely interpreted due to questions raised regarding the sexuality of the narrator, and therefore Shakespeare himself...

 and Sonnet 22

Sonnet 22

William Shakespeare's Sonnet 22 is among the part of his sequence written to a young man; more narrowly, it is among the early poems, in which the speaker of the poem and the young man are represented as enjoying a healthy and positive relationship...

. This argument, like others to rearrange the sonnets, has not received wide acceptance.

External links

• Paraphrase and analysis (Shakespeare-online)
• Analysis
• CliffsNotes