Sonnet 57: Being Your Slave, What Should I Do but Tend

Sonnet 57 is a poem about total submission — and the speaker knows exactly how total it is.

Sonnet 57 (Full Poem)

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu.

Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are how happy you make those.

So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

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At a Glance

Here are the key facts about Sonnet 57 for quick reference.

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Why It Still Matters

Sonnet 57 sounds like devotion. Read at speed, with the slave-and-servant language taken as conventional poetic self-abasement, it can seem like an elaborate compliment — the speaker so in love he has no existence outside the beloved’s desire. Poets say these things.

But the poem is more uncomfortable than that. Three times across the first two quatrains the speaker says what he does not dare: does not dare chide the waiting, does not dare think the absence bitter, does not dare question where the youth has gone. The repetition of “nor dare” is not humility; it is the description of a suppression. He feels all of these things — the tedium of waiting, the bitterness of absence, the jealous thought about where the youth is and with whom. He simply will not allow himself to act on any of them.

And in the third quatrain he names the worst of it: he stays and thinks of nothing except how happy the youth is making other people. This is not the warm thought of someone who delights in their beloved’s happiness. It is the corrosive thought of someone watching happiness they are not part of and forcing themselves not to resent it.

The couplet then does something unusual. It steps outside the poem’s frame of submission and offers a verdict — “So true a fool is love” — that is the speaker’s own clear-eyed judgment on his own condition. He knows he is a fool. He knows that love has made him incapable of thinking ill of the youth regardless of what the youth does. That awareness is total and completely without remedy. He cannot think ill of the youth. He knows this. He says so. And it changes nothing.

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Key Themes

Sonnet 57 develops one sustained argument across its three quatrains and a couplet, each section tightening the description of what submission actually looks like from the inside.

Submission Without Dignity. The slave-and-servant language runs from the opening word to the final couplet without interruption. “Being your slave,” “your sovereign,” “your servant,” “a sad slave” — the metaphor is not dropped or lightened anywhere. But this is not the submission of devotion that finds its own reward. The speaker is not glorying in service; he is describing a condition he is trapped in. The servitude strips him of time (“no precious time at all to spend”), of emotional response (“nor think the bitterness of absence sour”), and of thought (“think of nought”). By the third quatrain, the submission has become almost total: he has no self to speak of outside the youth’s existence in his mind.

Self-Aware Powerlessness. The poem’s most distinguishing feature is the speaker’s clear-eyed knowledge of his own condition. He does not think he is not jealous; he says he dares not act on the jealous thought. He does not think the absence is not bitter; he says he dares not think it sour. He is aware of every suppressed feeling, every forbidden response. And the awareness does nothing. This is the poem’s emotional centre — the gap between knowing what is happening to you and being unable to change it.

The Happiness of Others. The third quatrain’s most damaging line is the one about what the speaker stays and thinks of: “where you are how happy you make those.” Not what the youth is doing or where he is going — those would be jealous thoughts, and the speaker has suppressed those. What he allows himself to think about is the happiness the youth is creating for other people. This is the thought that jealousy produces when jealousy is forbidden: not anger at the rival but a kind of helpless acknowledgment that the beloved is out there making someone else happy.

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Key Literary Devices

The poem achieves its effects through a small number of devices, each deployed with unusual precision.

The Sustained Slave-Servant Metaphor. The metaphor of the speaker as slave and the youth as sovereign runs without interruption across all fourteen lines. Unlike many of Shakespeare’s conceits, which are introduced and then developed or complicated, this one simply deepens as the poem progresses. The slave of line 1 becomes the servant of line 8, becomes “a sad slave” of line 11 — each iteration adding the weight of another quatrain’s worth of described submission. By the couplet, the reader has been inside the slavery long enough to feel its texture.

The Triple “Nor Dare.” Lines 5, 7, and 9 each begin with “Nor dare” — the repeated negation building a rhythm of enforced silence and suppressed feeling. The rhetorical device is anaphora, but its emotional effect is more specific: each “nor dare” names something the speaker is actively choosing not to do, which means naming something he is feeling and suppressing. The accumulation of suppressions is the poem’s portrait of what love-as-submission actually costs.

“World-Without-End Hour.” The phrase is one of Shakespeare’s most arresting compounds. An hour that is without end — waiting experienced as a duration that will never resolve. The phrase borrows from the liturgical language of “world without end” (as in “glory be to the Father… world without end, amen”) and gives the waiting a quasi-religious quality: endless, cosmic, beyond human reckoning. It is a phrase that catches the emotional reality of waiting for someone who may not come — the way an hour can feel like eternity when desire is unanswered.

The Couplet’s Third Person. Throughout the poem the speaker has used the first person — “I,” “my,” “me.” The couplet shifts to the third person: “So true a fool is love that in your will, / Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.” The “he” is love, personified. But the shift from “I” to “he” also creates a small, crucial distance — the speaker stepping outside himself to observe his own condition from the outside. It is the stance of someone who has achieved full clarity about their situation and found that clarity gives them no purchase on it whatsoever.

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Stanza by Stanza

Lines 1–4. The poem’s opening — “Being your slave, what should I do but tend” — is a rhetorical question that contains its own answer. Being your slave, there is nothing else to do. The question performs the submission it describes: the speaker has already accepted the premise before asking the question. “I have no precious time at all to spend, / Nor services to do, till you require” — the speaker’s time and services belong entirely to the youth. He has no independent existence in the realm of action. He exists in a state of readiness, waiting for a call that may not come.

Lines 5–8. The second quatrain introduces what the speaker dares not do — and in doing so, tells us exactly what he feels. He dares not chide the “world-without-end hour” — the interminable waiting. He watches the clock “for you,” measuring not his own time but the youth’s. He dares not think the absence bitter, “when you have bid your servant once adieu.” The farewell is framed as the youth’s departure from the speaker, not the speaker’s from the youth — a small grammatical shift that places all the agency with the youth and all the passivity with the speaker. He has been bid adieu; he stays.

Lines 9–12. The third quatrain is the poem’s most painful. The speaker dares not question with his jealous thought — the jealousy is acknowledged, named, and immediately suppressed — where the youth may be or what his affairs are. “But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought” — the two words “sad slave” are the only moment in the poem where the speaker allows the emotional weight of the metaphor to show. He is not just a slave; he is a sad one. And what he thinks of is “where you are how happy you make those” — the people who are with the youth right now, receiving what the speaker is denied. It is a thought that jealousy produces and devotion is unable to suppress: not anger, but helpless awareness of the joy being given elsewhere.

Lines 13–14. The couplet steps back from the first-person immersion of the preceding twelve lines and delivers a judgment from outside the experience. “So true a fool is love” — love is a fool, and the speaker knows it, and the speaker is love’s instrument, which makes the speaker the fool. “Though you do anything, he thinks no ill” — anything. Not some things, not most things. Anything. The youth’s latitude is absolute; the speaker’s capacity for judgment is zero. The awareness is complete. The uselessness of the awareness is equally complete. The poem ends not with resolution but with a clear-eyed description of a trap.

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Analysis

Sonnet 57 is the sequence’s most direct portrait of psychological submission, and what makes it so uncomfortable is the speaker’s complete and completely useless self-knowledge. He knows he is a slave. He knows he is a fool. He knows that love has made him incapable of thinking ill of the youth regardless of what the youth does. None of this knowledge helps him.

The poem is often read as an expression of devoted love — the speaker so enamoured that he willingly surrenders all selfhood to the beloved’s wishes. But that reading is too comfortable. The slave metaphor is not a romantic convention deployed warmly; it is a description of a condition the speaker finds “sad.” The triple “nor dare” is not gracious self-abnegation; it is the enumeration of suppressions — feelings experienced and forcibly denied expression. The thought of the youth making other people happy is not a generous thought; it is the thought that jealousy produces when jealousy is forbidden.

The couplet’s shift to the third person is the key to the poem’s emotional register. “So true a fool is love that in your will, / Though you do anything, he thinks no ill” — the speaker is looking at himself from the outside, and what he sees is a fool who cannot think ill of someone who may well deserve it. The observation is sharp, accurate, and entirely without remedy. He cannot think ill of the youth. He knows this. The poem ends in that knowledge, without consolation and without exit.

Read alongside Sonnet 58 — the poem immediately following, which works through the same slave-and-waiting material with a slightly different emphasis — Sonnet 57 shows a speaker who has arrived at a kind of exhausted clarity about his own condition. It is not a comfortable poem. It is an honest one.

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Related Sonnets

Three sonnets speak directly to the concerns of Sonnet 57.

Sonnet 58: The immediate successor, working through the same slave-and-waiting material with a shift in emphasis toward time and patience. Where Sonnet 57 ends in the couplet’s bitter self-awareness, Sonnet 58 attempts a more resigned acceptance of the same situation. Reading them in sequence shows two approaches to the same condition — the bleak clarity of 57 giving way to something approaching, though not quite reaching, peace in 58.

Sonnet 116: The philosophical counterpart — the poem that defines love as something that does not alter, does not bend, maintains its constancy regardless of circumstance. Sonnet 116 describes the ideal love; Sonnet 57 describes what that ideal looks like when lived in the body by a person watching the clock and thinking of “nought / Save, where you are how happy you make those.” The two poems define the gap between love as principle and love as experience.

Sonnet 138: The Dark Lady sequence’s closest equivalent — another poem about a speaker who knows exactly what is happening in his relationship and finds that knowing changes nothing. Where Sonnet 57 suppresses jealousy and judgment in relation to the Fair Youth, Sonnet 138 sustains mutual deception with the Dark Lady. Both poems end in the same place: clear-eyed, self-aware, and unchanged.

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