Sonnet 30 by Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, one of his most famous, is a reflection on sad memories reconciled by the realization of the gift he has in his friend. A phrase from the second line of this sonnet has achieved a worldwide circulation in the literature of the twentieth century, with its concern with time: C. K. Scott-Moncrieff chose "Remembrance of Things Past" as the title for his English translation of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. The mood of depression, with absence from his friend, continues and brings back to the speaker the thought of earlier friends now dead, and former loves now over.

Synopsis
Shakespeare constructed Sonnet 29 in honor of his friend and possibly his lover, the Earl of Southampton (Shakespeare’s savior). He continues this theme in Sonnet 30. The poet’s mournful recollections of his deceased friends are ignited by the lover’s absence and can only be cured by the thoughts of his lover; this exemplifies his dependence on his cherished friend for spiritual and emotional support.

The sonnet begins by using courtroom metaphors ("session", "summon up" (as a witness), and "cancell'd" (as a debt)). The speaker paradoxically describes solitary contemplation as "sweet" despite his inevitable thought on sad things. Shakespeare grieves his failures and shortcomings ("I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought"), and, although the tragedy is long in the past, he "weep[s] afresh love's long since cancell'd woe". The theme of renewed sadness in contemplation figures prominently in the sonnet.
 * Then can I grieve at grievances forgone
 * And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
 * The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
 * Which I pay new as if not paid before.

The subject of lost friends and lost lovers, which in this sonnet emerges only from a more general evocation of things loved and lost, becomes the main subject of sonnet 31, which may well have been written almost immediately afterwards and in which Shakespeare declares that all those he has lost and lamented are, as it were reincarnated in his friend.

The sonnet continues the themes of grief, but while it is a poem about memory its language is surprisingly legal and financial. The poet meditates in solitude on past sorrows, failures, the memory of deceased friends, financial loses, and on old wounds. The concluding couplet, however offers the compensation as all woes vanish in recollection of the “dear friend”.

The sonnet ends with a touching statement that in his thoughts of sorrow, when he thinks of his friend, "All losses are restored and sorrows end." The sonnet is much similar in content and tone to Sonnet 29 ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes...").

Metaphors and imagery
The sonnet is intimately bound up with his response to individual metaphors. A metaphor which is obtrusive or vague may well undermine, or at least obscure, a sonnet’s literal statement. That literal statement will not usually be abandoned but it will have to co-exist with a potentially frustrating metaphoric competition. In some sonnets, though, the competition between metaphor and statement is a sustaining, not frustrating, element. An example is sonnet 30 which has one of the most exhaustive metaphors in the sonnets in this book. Coldly abstracted Sonnet 30 says the following: “When I meditate I remember dead friends whom I have long since ceased mourning over. I feel their loss anew until I think of you; with that thought I cease grieving at that loss”. That statement pays a great tribute to the power of the young man but it also has strong negative, reductive undertones which are only held in check by the distance between the sonnet’s statement and the metaphor it uses. The metaphor is, or course, a legal/financial one, beginning at “sessions” and continuing through “summon up”, “precious”, “cancelled”, “expense”, “tell o’er”, “account”, “pay”, and “paid”, to “losses are restored”. Added to those obvious images there is a strain of words which carry secondary legal/financial senses: “lack”, “dear”, “waste”, “unused”, “dateless”, "foregone", and “dear” again in the couplet. Nonetheless I can sympathize, it not agree with martin Seymour-smith’s judgment that the legal metaphor is “unobtrusive”, largely because it has to compete with another line of imagery, the poet’s sorrow: ”sigh”, “old woes”, “new wail”, “drown an eye”, “unused to flow”, “weep afresh”, “moan”, “grieve at grievances”, “heavily”, “from woe to woe”, “sad”, “fore-bemoaned moan”, and “sorrows”. I call this line of imagery because it does not quite have the standing of a metaphor; elements of it are metaphorical, but the reader’s vision is on sighs and tears-a literal and figurative form overcoming each other is the surprising degree to which they fail to interact. Put simply, the part of the mind which sees thought presiding over his court and summoning witness, the cancelling of debts and the spending of money, will not directly, or even indirectly, relate these images to sighs and tears. “Dateless” has its double reference – death has no end, like a lease which has no fixed term – but neither it nor the rest of the metaphor can be absorbed into the sonnet’s statement… Here the death of friends can not be so conveniently labeled. It exists, of course, as a poetic subject, but not normally as a subject, let alone a vehicle, for love poetry, one of whose conventional metaphors is the legal/financial. In essence Sonnet 30 preserves the balance between subject and metaphor, permitting the reader neither to turn it into the reductive statement ‘you are all my dead friends’, nor to read it as the involved love conceit which so much of its language points toward.

Interpretations
In sonnet 30 the poet indulges in just the sort of mourning what we saw him asking his friend- if somewhat ironically- to reject coldly in Sonnet 71 (“no longer mourn for me”). There are other relations between Sonnets 30 and Sonnet 71, especially in the tone of the two sonnets with their opposition between sentiment and marketplace. Indeed, perhaps it is the futility of marketplace methods in Sonnet 30 to appreciate the powers and needs of affection that leads in Sonnet 71 to the somewhat self-pitying indictment of the “vile world” in its emotional unresponsiveness. Both this sonnet and Sonnet 31 are elaborately metaphysical exempla for the homely proverb, “In love is no lack”; they may have been intended as such.

1. Sessions: the periodic sittings of the judges, a court of law (Seymour-smith notes that the legal metaphor “adds notion of guilt and punishment to that of nostalgia.”) 2. Summon: cite by authority to appear at a specified place, require an appearance before a court either to answer a charge or to give it evidence 6. Dateless: endless, without limit or fixed term.

This is one of the most pensive and gentle of the sonnets. It links in closely with the previous one, (Sonnet 29) both in thought and layout. The discontent with life which was expressed there still remains in this one, as the poet surveys his past life and all the sorrows it has brought him. The language is quasi-legal, possibly based on that appropriate to a manorial court investigating discrepancies in its accounts. Hence terms like, waste, expense, grievance, cancelled, tell o'er, paid before, are employed. When the account is finally reckoned up, with his dear friend added to the balance sheet, the discrepancies and losses disappear, and all sorrow is outweighed by the joy of remembering him.


 * Kenneth Branagh, for the 2002 compilation album, When Love Speaks (EMI Classics)