SONNET - 40 SUMMARY

 Sonnet No 40:

Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.
Then, if for my love, thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest;
But yet be blam'd, if thou thy self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty:
And yet, love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong, than hate's known injury.
   Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
   Kill me with spites yet we must not be foes.

 It is one of the sequences addressed to a well-born, handsome young man to whom the speaker is devoted. In this poem, as in the others in this part of the sequence, the speaker expresses resentment of his beloved's power over him. This is one of the most desolate sonnets in the entire series. Desperate situations call for desperate remedies, and the poet casts around to find a way out of his misery. He cannot disguise the naked fact that his beloved youth has behaved treacherously and stolen his mistress. This and the following two sonnets try to come to terms with the reality of the deception and loss. The initial exclamation springs as it were from exhaustion, as if having examined all possible motives for the actions of the youth, he can find no justification therein and decides to throw in the towel.  Let his beloved have all his loves, for they are valueless compared to the love which he feels for the youth. Yet immediately doubts begin to resurface; The beloved's motives are called into question once more. Did he really believe that he could augment his store of love by adding the poet's mistress? Or did he not rather deliberately deceive himself, and act out of sheer wantonness, with no thought of the other's hurt? But perhaps that is too gross an accusation. Whatever the motives, forgiveness is the best course, for something must be salvaged from the wreck.  Even so, querulousness cannot be supressed and the beloved comes close to depicted as the worst sort of thief stealing a miserable pensioner's last savings. The proverbial thought is cited that the harm a lover's wrong can do is far greater than injuries caused by an enemy. The closing couplet tries to rescue the situation, and its very weakness seems to give it its strength greater than any linguistic tour-de-force could have provided.

Reference: shakespeare-sonnets.com