"Sonnet 30" by William Shakespeare

Source of the text - Shakespeare's Sonnets, Being a Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Edition, 1609, from the copy in the Malone Collection in the Bodleian Library.  Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1905.



Sonnet 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste;
Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow)
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan th’expense of many a vanished sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanéd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before:
      But if the while I think on thee (dear friend)
      All losses are restored, and sorrows end.


Source of the text - William Shakespeare, The Sonnets: Updated Edition, edited by G. Blakemore Evans.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

TJB: Grief equals debt. Like an attorney eating his madeleine & reopening an old bankruptcy, the speaker densely, repetitively re-sighs old woes.