Sonnet 87: Farewell! Thou Art Too Dear for My Possessing

Sonnet 87 is a farewell built on the speaker’s acceptance of his own unworthiness — and the couplet quietly suggests that the relationship may have been an illusion all along.

Sonnet 8 (Full Poem)

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.

For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.

Thyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me to whom thou gav’st it else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.

Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

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At a Glance

Here are the key facts about Sonnet 87 for quick reference.

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Why It Still Matters

Sonnet 87 is one of two sonnets in the sequence written entirely in feminine rhymes — every line ending on an unstressed syllable, giving the poem a trailing, unresolved quality that enacts its subject. Things keep not quite closing. The rhymes fall but never land with finality. The effect is of something slipping away rather than ending, which is exactly what the poem is about.

The legal and financial metaphor that runs across all three quatrains presents the relationship as a contract that the speaker was never qualified to hold. The youth’s charter of worth gives him the right to release himself; the speaker’s bonds are all determinate — expired. The gift of the youth’s affection was given by mistake, either because the youth did not know his own value or because he misjudged the speaker’s. Now the mistake has been recognised, and the gift comes home.

Read this way, the poem sounds like gracious acceptance of one’s own inadequacy — the speaker magnanimously releasing the youth from a commitment he was never really owed. But the couplet complicates this. “Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter, / In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.” The relationship is compared to a dream of being a king — something that felt real and magnificent during sleep, but which waking reveals as nothing. This is not the same as humbly accepting unworthiness. This is the suggestion that what the speaker experienced as real — the love, the connection, the whole sequence of feeling — was possibly an illusion from the beginning.

The question the couplet leaves open is whether the speaker believes this, or whether the legal framework of the three quatrains is a way of managing a grief too sharp to name directly.

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Key Themes

Sonnet 87 is organised around a single sustained legal metaphor, and what the metaphor does — and what it might be concealing — is the poem’s central interest.

The Relationship as Contract. The entire three-quatrain argument is conducted in the language of legal rights and financial value. Charter, bonds, determinate, granting, deserving, patent, gift, misprision, judgement — the vocabulary is that of property law and contract. The youth has a charter — a legal document establishing his rights — that gives him the power to release himself from whatever bond the speaker held. The speaker’s bonds are determinate: expired, at an end, no longer binding. The relationship was a patent — a formal grant — held not by right but by the youth’s permission.

This legal vocabulary does something specific: it removes the relationship from the domain of feeling entirely. There is no love in the metaphor, only value, permission, and the correction of an error. The speaker has transformed the end of an intimate relationship into the cancellation of a lease. Whether this transformation is a coping mechanism or a genuine assessment of how the relationship felt from the outside is the poem’s unresolved question.

Unworthiness as the Speaker’s Construction. The speaker presents his own unworthiness as self-evident — “for that riches where is my deserving?” — but the unworthiness is his own construction, not something the poem establishes independently. The youth has not been quoted saying the speaker is unworthy. No evidence is offered beyond the speaker’s own assessment. The legal metaphor takes the speaker’s self-judgement and encodes it as fact: the gift was given by mistake, the patent was never rightfully held, the charter always entitled the youth to leave. The three-quatrain argument is the speaker building the case for his own inadequacy as if it were an objective finding.

The Dream and Its Aftermath. The couplet’s dream metaphor is the poem’s most devastating moment because it withdraws the reality of the entire preceding relationship. A king in a dream is not a king; the kingship is the dream’s flattery, not a fact. The speaker was briefly permitted to feel — in sleep — a grandeur that waking life denies him. The relationship was the dream. Waking is the return to the speaker’s actual condition: no such matter.

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Key Literary Devices

The poem’s most distinctive technical feature — and the one most closely related to its emotional content — is its rhyme scheme.

Feminine Rhyme Throughout. Every rhyme in Sonnet 87 is feminine: possessing/releasing, granting/deserving, knowing/growing, flatter/matter (the last pair being a near-rhyme rather than a perfect one). In a feminine rhyme the final syllable is unstressed, giving the line an extra beat that trails off rather than landing firmly. Where masculine rhyme closes decisively, feminine rhyme leaves an opening — a syllable that sounds but doesn’t resolve. This quality is perfectly suited to a poem about something ending without resolution, about loss that cannot quite be named as loss. The rhymes keep not quite finishing. The poem keeps not quite settling. The form enacts the feeling.

The Legal-Financial Vocabulary. The sustained use of legal and commercial language across all three quatrains — charter, bonds, determinate, patent, misprision, judgement — does the emotional work of distancing. By turning the relationship into a contract, the speaker removes it from the domain of feeling and places it in the domain of law, where things can be assessed, corrected, and concluded without reference to what anyone felt. The distancing is the speaker’s method of managing the loss. Whether it works — whether the couplet’s dream reveals that it did not — is the poem’s question.

“Misprision.” The legal term means both error or mistake and, in a more specific sense, the concealment of knowledge of a crime or offence — the failure to report what one knows. “Thy great gift, upon misprision growing” — the gift of the youth’s love grew upon a mistake, or upon a concealment. The ambiguity is productive: either the youth was genuinely mistaken about the speaker’s worth, or the youth’s gift involved some kind of suppression or concealment — knowing something that was not acknowledged. The word holds both possibilities without resolving them.

“In Sleep a King, but Waking No Such Matter.” The couplet’s dream image is the poem’s most compressed moment. A king in sleep is a king only in the dream — the kingship has no reality outside it. “Waking, no such matter” — in waking life, the speaker is not a king, never was, and the experience of being one was the dream’s fiction. Applied to the relationship: the speaker felt during the relationship what he feels a king must feel — valued, elevated, belonging to something magnificent. Waking — returning to the ordinary assessment of his own worth — reveals that the feeling was the relationship’s flattery, not a truth about him.

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Stanza by Stanza

Lines 1–4. The poem opens with a farewell exclamation and immediately contextualises it: the youth is too dear to be possessed by the speaker. “Like enough thou know’st thy estimate” — the youth probably knows his own worth, which is what makes the release inevitable. “The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing” — the youth’s value itself is what entitles him to leave; his worth is a legal document authorising his freedom from the speaker. “My bonds in thee are all determinate” — the bonds have expired. The legal framework is established completely in the first quatrain: the speaker holds the youth not by right but by permission, and that permission has been revoked by the revision of the youth’s self-knowledge.

Lines 5–8. The second quatrain deepens the self-assessment. “How do I hold thee but by thy granting?” — the only claim the speaker has on the youth is the youth’s consent. There is no independent right, no merit that justifies the holding. “For that riches where is my deserving?” — the question implies the answer: nowhere. The riches of the youth’s affection are not matched by anything in the speaker. “The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting” — the reason the gift was given cannot be found in the speaker; whatever justified it originally is not there. “And so my patent back again is swerving” — the patent (the legal grant of right) is returning to its origin, the youth, because the justification for its being held by the speaker has collapsed.

Lines 9–12. The third quatrain reframes the relationship’s beginning as an error. The youth gave himself not knowing his own worth, or mistaking the speaker’s worth. Either way, the gift was given under false pretences. “Upon misprision growing” — founded on a mistake. “Comes home again, on better judgement making” — the gift returns when the judgement is corrected. The third quatrain completes the legal argument: the relationship was a contract based on a misapprehension, and correcting the misapprehension terminates the contract. The language is entirely formal. Nothing the speaker actually felt, or feels now, is named.

Lines 13–14. The couplet steps outside the legal framework entirely and offers a different kind of account. “Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter” — the whole relationship reframed as a dream. “In sleep a king, but waking no such matter” — the speaker experienced something during the relationship that he can only describe as the feeling of being a king — valued, elevated, magnificent. But this was the dream’s flattery, not a truth about the speaker. Waking, he is no king; waking, the relationship is revealed as the illusion that made him feel like one. The legal argument of the three quatrains — which was at least controlled and organised — gives way in the couplet to something more desperate: the possibility that the whole experience was not real in the way the speaker thought it was.

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Analysis

Sonnet 87 is the sequence’s most sustained exercise in legal self-abasement, and what makes it interesting is not the self-abasement itself but the question of whether it is honest or evasive.

The legal metaphor that organises the three quatrains is elegant and complete. The youth has a charter; the speaker lacks deserving; the gift was given by mistake; the patent reverts. Within the metaphor’s logic, the end of the relationship is not grief but correction — the universe returning to a proper state after a temporary error. The speaker has found a framework in which what is actually a loss becomes a resolution, a fixing of something that was wrong.

But the framework requires the speaker to accept, and to assert as objective fact, that he was never worthy of the youth’s love. The three-quatrain argument does not leave room for the possibility that the relationship was real and its ending is simply loss. By encoding the relationship as a contract held without right, the speaker removes the possibility of grieving it as something genuine that is now gone. He can only acknowledge it as a mistake that has been corrected.

The couplet refuses this framework. The dream image does not correct the legal metaphor or argue against it; it simply replaces it with something rawer. In sleep a king — the feeling was magnificent, whatever its legal status. Waking, no such matter — and the return to ordinary life is the return to the speaker’s actual condition, which is to feel like nothing. The couplet is the grief that the three quatrains were designed to contain, breaking through in the last two lines.

The feminine rhyme throughout the poem supports this reading. The lines keep trailing off, not closing firmly, leaving an unstressed syllable hanging at the end — exactly the quality of something that has ended but not resolved, of grief that has been given a legal form but continues underneath it.

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Related Sonnets

Three sonnets speak directly to the concerns of Sonnet 87.

Sonnet 20: The only other sonnet in the sequence written entirely in feminine rhyme. Where Sonnet 20 uses feminine rhyme to enact the poem’s engagement with gender instability and androgyny, Sonnet 87 uses it to enact the trailing, unresolved quality of a loss that cannot quite be named. The formal parallel connects two of the sequence’s most formally unusual poems.

Sonnet 57: The earlier meditation on the power imbalance in the same relationship — the speaker as slave, the youth as sovereign. Where Sonnet 57 describes the submission as ongoing and present, Sonnet 87 describes its end. Reading them together shows the arc: from the submission that the speaker could not escape to the farewell that accepts it as permanent.

Sonnet 71: The other great self-erasure poem in the sequence. Where Sonnet 71 asks to be forgotten out of love and social fear, Sonnet 87 accepts rejection out of self-assessed unworthiness. Both poems end with the speaker absent from the youth’s life, but for different reasons and in different emotional registers. Reading both together gives the fullest picture of the sequence’s self-effacing tendencies.

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