Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought Essay Questions

Describe the speaker’s emotional life. How has he changed over time?

The poem begins with the speaker describing a habit of purposefully recalling things that have happened to him: “I summon up remembrance of things past.” He says that these thoughts cause him to cry (”drown an eye”) but that he is not used to weeping. Before beginning these memory sessions, the speaker was mostly stoic. Yet now he newly weeps over the things he cried over in the past. Paradoxically, this causes his happiness, because in his sadness he thinks about his “dear friend.” This thought is enough to make him as happy as he was before time and death caused him to lose the things he loved.

How does financial language function in the poem?

Sonnet 30 uses a number of motifs and metaphors from finance. For example, the speaker described his sadness over things and people lost as a “cancelled woe.” In other words, he has already paid this debt in full. Similarly, the “vanished sight[s]” that make him sad were an “expense,” or a thing paid at a heavy cost. This motif shows that the past makes heavy demands of him. He has to pay this debt, but even when he does, his heartbreaks can still ask for more. Remembering the past causes the speaker to “pay as if not paid before.”

How does the thought of his friend affect the speaker?

The entire first part of the poem describes the speaker’s woe and sorrow. He grieves friends lost or opportunities missed. Even though these sorrows are long past, he weeps over them as if they have just happened. However, in the final stanza, the speaker thinks of his “dear friend” and everything changes. The love he feels is so powerful that just thinking of this person causes “All losses [to be] restored.” All the pain of the past was worth it for bringing him to this moment.

What is the source of the speaker’s sadness?

The speaker is mainly affected by death and time. He complains that close friends are “hid in death’s dateless night,” meaning that they have died. Similarly, he is upset about “many a vanished sight.” This can mean both things that he misses seeing or previous “sighs.” In fact, the speaker’s sadness in the present has as much to do with his recollection of previous woes as with the actual things that first made him feel that way.

Which aspects of the poem cause it to be criticized by literary scholars?

The final couplet of Sonnet 30 is considered by some critics to be too hasty. After 12 lines describing the speaker’s pain and sorrow, the couplet ties everything up a bit too neatly. In this way, the poem can seem unbalanced. Other critics point out that the poem is full of clunky repeated words, such as “fore-bemoanèd moan” or “grieve at grievances foregone.” In particular, Sonnet 30 is evaluated negatively in comparison to Sonnet 29, which deals with similar themes in a more balanced and convincing way.