ABSTRACT
Near the beginning of the twentieth century, an editor of Shakespeare's Sonnets considered it “pleasant” to report a commentator's forthright admission that the final lines of sonnet 124 were “hopelessly obscure” and that he would add no more to the attempts to explain them (Alden 293). Earlier and later generations of readers, however, have seemed to enjoy the work's obscurities or, as many say, “difficulties,” finding in them more a challenge than a source of frustration. 1 In whichever critical direction one's pleasure lies, the poem is not on any count an exercise for impatient minds: If my dear love were but the child of state, It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered, As subject to Time's love, or to Time's hate, Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered. No, it was builded far from accident; It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls Under the blow of thrallèd discontent, Whereto th'inviting time our fashion calls; It fears not Policy, that heretic, Which works on leases of short-numb'red hours, But all alone stands hugely politic, That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with show'rs. To this I witness call the fools of Time, Which die for goodness, who have Uved for crime. 2
