Sonnet 71
1. No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
2. Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
3. Give warning to the world that I am fled
4. From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
5. Nay if you read this line, remember not,
6. The hand that writ it, for I love you so,
7. That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
8. If thinking on me then should make you woe.
9. O, if (I say) you look upon this verse
10. When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
11. Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
12. But let your love even with my life decay.
13. Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
14. And mock you with me after I am gone.
From This Vile World I am Fled
Dedication: To Elizabeth
Oxford instructing Elizabeth to forget him and his name when he dies. He has reached the depression stage of the mourning for the loss of his princely son.
1st Quatrain: (1-4)
Telling Elizabeth not to mourn for him and wishing the world adue.
2nd Quatrain: (5-8)
Telling her not to remember him, that he loves her still, and wishing her not to think about him should it bring her distress.
3rd Quatrain: (9-12)
Telling her to let her love for him decay and forget his name.
couplet (13-14),
Alluding to those in the know about what she has done (you now) mocking her as well.
Commentary:
Oxford at near his lowest (lowest is probably 66) and experiencing the inevitable depression that comes with grief. An indicator of the arrow of time. Line 4 reveals his reason with his expectation that the worms will be the inheritors of Henry as he told us in line 7 of 146. Though he also will be the prey of worms as he told us in 46 line 10 as he has the expectation of being forgotten himself. Even in this depressed state, this sonnet also expresses Oxford’s love for Elizabeth and his expressed desire not to remember him should it bring her the woe of the remembrance of him, Henry and the implied crime she has committed for concealing Henry. This the reason for the world’s viewing her “moan” and the mocking that is to be the result.
The key to understanding this sonnet is of course the source of the terrible pain the poet refers to with language like, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead / . . . / From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.” The poet expressing hopelessness, possibly to play on his subject’s guilt is yet a new method of achieving his goal. Though very probably real and an indication of tremendous depression the poet is experiencing. Certainly a depression that can seemingly be reconciled with Oxford’s life as he retreated quite noticeably from public life around the was noted that he expressed desperation in his letters. This all likely around the time of 1590 his fortieth year. See Nelson p.322
Vendler mentions the bitterness against the wise world and points out that it can be compared to “his outcries in other sonnets against his disgrace in men’s eyes (29) and his branded name (111)”.None of which have any known biographical basis of association with the man presently thought to be Shakespeare. But with so little known, virtually anything is presumably possible about his life.Which has always struck me a subclass of the larger unfounded understanding of Shakespeare and an illustration of the great contradiction of the certainty with which the Stratford man’s authorship is known and yet almost nothing else about him is.