Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o’er-green my bad, my good allow?
You are my all the world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue;
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steel’d sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others’ voices, that my adder’s sense
To critic and to flatterer stopped are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides methinks are dead.
by by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
I find myself returning once again to Shakespeare’s sonnets, especially to the sequence of 126 poems that the poet addressed to a “Fair Youth“. This one is written in quite difficult language (for me) with some obscure words and phrases such as “adder’s sense”, “o’er-green” and “steel’d sense”. It’s almost as if parts of it are written in code. Nevertheless the overall meaning of the poem is clear: it revolves around the beautiful “You are my all the world” in line 5, shining out through the thickets, with “all the world” repeated in the last line for extra effect. The poet is saying that nobody’s opinion of him matters at all except that of his beloved. Know the feeling?
In the Dark 