Sonnet 58 is a performance of patience — and the couplet is where the performance breaks.
Sonnet 58 (Full Poem)
That God forbid, that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand the account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure.
O, let me suffer, being at your beck,
The imprison’d absence of your liberty;
And patience tame to sufferance bide each check,
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time:
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,
Not blame your pleasure be it ill or well.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 58 for quick reference.
Sonnet 58 of 154
Fair Youth (Sonnets 1–126)
The effort to sustain patience under the strain of unequal love
Shakespearean sonnet: three quatrains and a couplet
Legal and feudal metaphor; the couplet’s breaking of its own discipline
Controlled and self-disciplining throughout, until the couplet admits the cost
Why It Still Matters
Sonnet 58 follows directly from Sonnet 57, and the two poems together show the same situation handled two different ways. Sonnet 57’s speaker is bitter and clear-eyed — he knows he is a fool, says so in the couplet, and achieves a kind of bleak clarity. Sonnet 58’s speaker is attempting something harder: to actually feel the patience he is performing. He is forbidding himself not just the expression of complaint but the thought of it. “That God forbid… I should in thought control your times of pleasure” — the prohibition is on the thought itself, not merely its expression.
This is active self-discipline, and the effort is visible throughout the poem. The speaker constructs the position of patient, uncomplaining acceptance with care across twelve lines — granting the youth absolute freedom, absolving him of any account, refusing to name what is being done to him as injury. The language is legal and formal, as though the rights and duties of the relationship are being written into a kind of contract.
And then the couplet: “I am to wait, though waiting so be hell.”
Hell. After twelve lines of careful construction, the word arrives and undoes it. Not “difficult” or “hard” or even “painful” — hell. The speaker has spent the whole poem building toward patience and in the couplet he reveals what patience actually costs. The performance holds until the last two lines, and then the truth of it shows through. That crack is the poem’s most important moment.
Key Themes
Sonnet 58 works through one sustained argument — the attempt to achieve genuine patience — and the themes are all dimensions of that attempt and its partial failure.
Self-Discipline as the Poem’s Subject. The poem is not about the youth’s freedom or the speaker’s servitude in any abstract sense. It is about the speaker’s effort to police his own responses to those things — to forbid himself not just complaint but the thought of complaint. This makes it a more psychologically precise poem than Sonnet 57, because it is not describing what has already happened (submission accepted, bitterness present) but what the speaker is actively trying to make himself feel. The effort is ongoing, present-tense, and ultimately unsuccessful — the couplet is the failure.
The Charter of Absolute Freedom. The third quatrain grants the youth something remarkable: the right to pardon himself for anything he does. “Your charter is so strong / That you yourself may privilege your time: / To what you will; to you it doth belong / Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.” The youth is not just free in practice; he is free in principle. He has no obligation to account for himself, no wrongdoing that can be held against him. The speaker has constructed a legal fiction of absolute immunity for the beloved — and the construction of that fiction is itself a form of emotional self-protection. If the youth has done nothing wrong, there is nothing to be angry about.
The Cost of Patience. The couplet names it: hell. Not metaphorical hell, not mild discomfort dressed in strong language, but the actual word that signals the sharpest available register of suffering. The speaker has maintained discipline for twelve lines — the “O, let me suffer” of line 5 is not a complaint but an embrace of suffering as the necessary condition of loyalty — and in the couplet the discipline breaks just enough for the truth to show. “Though waiting so be hell” does not contradict the rest of the poem; it completes it honestly.
Key Literary Devices
The poem’s devices are all in service of the same project — the construction and partial maintenance of patience — and each one reveals something about how that construction works.
Legal and Feudal Language. “Slave,” “vassal,” “charter,” “privilege,” “pardon,” “account,” “injury,” “crime” — the poem is saturated with the language of legal rights and feudal obligation. This vocabulary does specific work: it transforms an emotional situation into a quasi-contractual one, where the terms of the relationship are fixed in advance and the speaker’s role is defined by those terms. If the youth has a charter granting him absolute freedom, and if the speaker is a vassal bound by those terms, then there is no room for grievance — the terms were agreed. The legal language is the speaker’s attempt to remove the situation from the domain of feeling into the domain of obligation, where it is easier to bear.
“The Imprison’d Absence of Your Liberty.” One of the poem’s most compressed and uncomfortable phrases. The youth’s liberty — his freedom to go where he pleases — creates the speaker’s imprisonment. The phrase holds the paradox precisely: the beloved’s freedom and the speaker’s confinement are not separate facts but the same fact described from two positions. The more free the youth is, the more confined the speaker. Their situations are structurally linked and opposed.
“Patience Tame to Sufferance.” The phrase in line 7 — “patience tame to sufferance bide each check” — is dense and worth unpacking. “Tame” as a verb means to discipline or domesticate; “sufferance” means patient endurance; “bide each check” means to endure each rebuke or setback. So the speaker is taming patience itself to endure — training even patience to hold under the pressure of what is being asked of it. This is not passive patience but active, effortful patience, the kind that requires continuous work to maintain.
The Couplet’s “Hell.” The word is the poem’s most important. It arrives after twelve lines of careful self-discipline — after “O, let me suffer,” after the construction of the youth’s charter, after the deliberate grants of absolute freedom — and it names what that discipline has been concealing. “Though waiting so be hell” is the crack in the performance. The speaker does not say waiting is difficult, or that it costs something, or that he bears it nobly. He says it is hell. The word is the honest centre of a poem that has been working to avoid honesty, and its arrival is the couplet’s most important event.
Stanza by Stanza
Lines 1–4. The poem opens with a prohibition that the speaker is imposing on himself: God forbid that he should try to control the youth’s time or demand an account of how it is spent. “That God forbid” is a strong oath, and the strength reveals the temptation being forbidden. He wants to control, wants to demand the account — and is forbidding himself the desire as much as the action. “Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure” — the feudal metaphor is established immediately. A vassal waits on the lord’s pleasure; the speaker’s role in this relationship is the same. He stays; the youth goes.
Lines 5–8. The second quatrain shifts from prohibition to embrace. “O, let me suffer” — not “I will suffer” or “I must suffer” but “let me suffer,” as though suffering patiently is a permission he is requesting. The phrase suggests that even suffering with grace requires a kind of consent — that the speaker is choosing, or trying to choose, to receive the “imprison’d absence” without resentment. “Patience tame to sufferance bide each check” — patience trained to endurance, disciplined to hold each setback without breaking. The claim is that no accusation of injury will be made. The claim is the poem’s effort. The couplet will reveal whether it holds.
Lines 9–12. The third quatrain gives the youth his absolute charter. “Be where you list” — go wherever you choose. “Your charter is so strong / That you yourself may privilege your time” — your legal right is so absolute that you can grant yourself whatever exceptions you need. “Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime” — even if what you have done could be called a crime, the pardon belongs to you alone. No one else has standing to judge. The speaker is not merely conceding the youth’s freedom in practice; he is constructing, with considerable legal precision, a theoretical framework in which the youth cannot be held accountable for anything. The construction is the speaker’s self-protection: if there is no wrong, there is no grievance; if there is no grievance, there is nothing to endure.
Lines 13–14. The couplet dismantles the construction in two lines. “I am to wait, though waiting so be hell” — the patience is confirmed (“I am to wait”) and immediately undercut (“though waiting so be hell”). The confirmation comes first, the undercutting second, and the sequence is precise: the speaker does maintain the discipline, and it is hell to do so. Both things are true simultaneously. “Not blame your pleasure be it ill or well” — the final line returns to the position of no-blame, no-judgment, acceptance of whatever the youth chooses. But the line arrives after “hell,” and the word stands. The discipline holds in the end, but only just, and only at the cost that the couplet has named.
Analysis
Sonnet 58 is the sequence’s most precise portrait of the effort required to sustain patience under the strain of unequal love. Where Sonnet 57 describes the condition of submission from the outside — the speaker observing himself as “a sad slave,” the couplet delivering a clear-eyed verdict from the third person — Sonnet 58 is inside the effort, present-tense, showing what it costs to hold the position the speaker has committed to.
The poem’s most interesting quality is the gap between what the speaker is trying to feel and what he actually feels. He is trying to feel genuine patience — not suppressed complaint but something more absolute, a state in which the youth’s freedom is genuinely accepted and genuinely unchallenged. The first twelve lines are the construction of that state, built from legal and feudal vocabulary that removes the situation from the realm of feeling into the realm of obligation. If the terms are fixed, there is nothing to feel; there is only the role to perform.
But the couplet shows that the construction is incomplete. The speaker waits — he does wait, the discipline holds — but he waits through what he cannot help calling hell. The legal fiction of the youth’s charter, the feudal acceptance of vassal status, the deliberate refusal to name injury as injury: all of this holds, and all of it is held at the cost of a word that the speaker cannot quite suppress in the last two lines.
This is a different and more difficult emotional position than Sonnet 57’s bitter self-awareness. Sonnet 57’s speaker has given up on patience; he knows he is a fool and accepts it. Sonnet 58’s speaker is still trying. The poem is the trying — the construction of patience, the maintenance of discipline, and in the couplet’s single word, the honest acknowledgment of what that costs.
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets speak directly to the concerns of Sonnet 58.
Sonnet 57: The immediate predecessor and the closest companion. Both poems work through the slave-and-waiting material, but from different emotional positions. Sonnet 57’s speaker has abandoned the attempt at patience and arrived at bitter self-awareness; Sonnet 58’s speaker is still making the attempt and revealing its cost. Reading them in sequence shows the full range of the speaker’s responses to the same situation — the clarity of 57 giving way to the effortful discipline of 58, and the discipline breaking just far enough in the couplet to show what it is holding.
Sonnet 116: The philosophical ideal against which Sonnet 58 measures itself. Sonnet 116 defines love as something that “bears it out even to the edge of doom” — constant, unwavering, enduring. Sonnet 58 shows what bearing it out actually looks like: waiting through hell and calling it patience. The ideal and its embodiment in practice are not the same thing, and reading the two poems together makes that gap visible.
Sonnet 66: The sequence’s other great poem of exhausted endurance — “Tired with all these, for restful death I cry” — which finds the speaker at the limit of what can be borne and held in place only by the thought of the beloved. Where Sonnet 58 performs patience through legal self-discipline, Sonnet 66 abandons the performance and names exhaustion directly. Both poems arrive at the same place — the beloved as the reason to continue — but by very different routes.