Sonnet 112: Your Love and Pity Doth Th’ Impression Fill
Sonnet 112: Your Love and Pity Doth Th’ Impression Fill - context Summary
Published 1609 in Sonnets
Sonnet 112 appears in Shakespeare's 1609 collection and has no recorded occasion. It presents a speaker who relies entirely on a beloved’s love and pity to erase public scandal and silence critics. The poem emphasizes emotional isolation and dependence: other voices are dismissed, and the beloved’s judgment becomes the sole measure of shame and praise. The sonnet closes with a hyperbolic sense that the rest of the world is dead to him.
Read Complete AnalysesYour love and pity doth th’ impression fill Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow; For what care I who calls me well or ill, So you o’ergreen 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 steeled 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 stoppèd 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.
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