Sonnet 66 claims that the world’s injustices have made the speaker long for death, and that the only thing keeping him alive is that dying would leave the one he loves alone.
Sonnet 66: Full Poem
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry:
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disablèd,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill.
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 66 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 66 Means
Sonnet 66 is a list of everything wrong with the world, followed by the single reason the speaker stays in it.
The first line states the speaker’s condition: he is so worn out by what he sees around him that he cries out for the rest of death. The next eleven lines say what he sees. Deserving people are born into poverty, while worthless people dress in finery. Loyalty is betrayed, honors go to the unworthy, and the innocent are slandered.
The list goes on. True excellence is disgraced, and strength is crippled by weak leadership. Art is silenced by the authorities, and fools with the airs of learned men give orders to the skilled. Honesty is dismissed as stupidity, and goodness serves evil as a prisoner serves a captain.
Line 13 repeats the opening words: tired of all this, the speaker would like to leave it behind. Then the last line reverses everything. He would die, except that dying would mean leaving the one he loves alone in such a world.
Sonnet 66 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 66 sets a whole society against a single relationship, and its themes follow that contrast.
A World Turned Upside Down
Every item in the list is a reversal. Merit is poor and emptiness is rich; honesty is mocked and foolishness gives orders; good is the prisoner and evil the captain. The poem does not describe random misfortune but a world in which the proper order of worth has been inverted, where the wrong people rise and the right people are pushed down.
Weariness Rather Than Rage
For all its bitterness, the poem’s key word is “tired.” The speaker does not call for revolt or revenge. He wants “restful death,” an end to looking at what he cannot change. The flat, repeated rhythm of the list carries that exhaustion: each line adds one more weight to a load that is already too heavy.
Love as the Reason to Stay
Against twelve lines of public corruption, the final line offers one private tie. The speaker stays alive not because the world improves, but because of the person he loves. The poem gives that love no argument or justification. It simply puts one line on the other side of the scale and lets it outweigh the rest.
Form and Language
Sonnet 66 abandons the usual step-by-step argument of a sonnet for a single relentless list.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem keeps the Shakespearean rhyme scheme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, in iambic pentameter, but it ignores the quatrains. Lines 2 to 12 form one unbroken catalog, so the rhymes mark no stages of argument at all. The opening line begins with its stress on “Tired,” said as one syllable, so the poem starts with a heavy, reversed foot. “Disablèd” in line 8 is sounded as three syllables to fill out the meter.
Anaphora
Ten lines in a row, lines 3 to 12, begin with “And.” The repetition of a word at the start of successive lines is called anaphora, and here it makes the list feel endless: each “And” announces yet another grievance. Our guide to Shakespeare’s rhetorical devices covers anaphora and the other patterns of repetition he uses.
Personified Abstractions
The list contains no named people. Instead, qualities act like characters: “desert,” “faith,” “honor,” “virtue,” “art,” “folly,” “truth,” “good,” and “ill.” Each is given a fate, beggared, betrayed, silenced, or imprisoned. The personification lets the poem accuse the whole society without accusing anyone in particular.
Wordplay in the List
Several lines turn on pairs of similar words. “Right perfection wrongfully disgraced” sets “right” against “wrong”; “simple truth miscalled simplicity” uses “simplicity” in its old sense of foolishness; and “captive good attending captain ill” pairs “captive” and “captain,” prisoner and commander, to show the order of the world reversed. Our guide to literary devices in the sonnets covers more of this kind of wordplay.
“Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority”
Line 9 has drawn special attention because it may touch on Shakespeare’s own profession. Plays in his time had to be licensed by an official censor before they could be performed, and many readers hear a reference to that control. The line could also mean learning in general, silenced by those in power.
A Closer Reading
Sonnet 66 answers twelve lines of despair with one line of love, and the last word of that line cuts two ways.
The final line reads, “Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.” The obvious meaning is that dying would abandon the beloved. But “alone” also recalls everything the poem has just listed. To leave the young man alone is to leave him alone in this world, a world where virtue is slandered, honesty mocked, and goodness held captive. The speaker stays not only because he would miss his love, but because his love would be left without anyone on his side among all these wrongs.
That reading changes what the couplet claims. It does not say that love makes the world bearable, and it does not take back a single item on the list. The corruption remains, word for word. What changes is the speaker’s role in it. He began as a spectator, tired of what he had to “behold.” He ends as a protector, choosing to stay because someone he loves has to live there too.
The next sonnet in the sequence takes up exactly that worry, asking why the young man should have to live among such corruption at all. And the list itself is often compared to Hamlet’s catalog of life’s injustices in “To be, or not to be,” which also weighs “the law’s delay” and “the insolence of office” against the wish for death. Our guide to Shakespeare’s soliloquies looks at that speech.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 66, answered briefly.
What Is Sonnet 66 About?
The speaker’s weariness with a corrupt and unjust world. He lists its wrongs and says he would welcome death, except that dying would leave the young man of the Fair Youth sonnets alone.
Is Sonnet 66 About Suicide?
It expresses a longing for death, “restful death,” as an escape from what the speaker sees. The poem turns away from that wish in its last line, when love gives him a reason to stay.
What Does “Captive Good Attending Captain Ill” Mean?
Goodness, taken prisoner, forced to serve evil as its commander. The pairing of “captive” and “captain” shows the proper order of the world turned upside down.
Why Does Almost Every Line Start With “And”?
The repetition, called anaphora, turns the poem into a mounting list. Each “And” adds another grievance, so the reader feels the weight of them accumulating.
Was Sonnet 66 Set to Music?
Yes. Dmitri Shostakovich set Boris Pasternak’s Russian translation of it in his 1942 song cycle Six Romances on Verses by English Poets.
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets in which despair meets the thought of the beloved, or of death.