Sonnet 71 asks the young man to forget the poet after his death, first out of love and then, in the couplet, out of fear that the world will mock him for grieving.
Sonnet 71: Full Poem
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 71 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 71 Means
Sonnet 71 is a set of instructions for the young man to follow after the speaker dies, and every instruction asks for less remembering than the one before.
The first quatrain sets a time limit on grief. Mourn for me, the speaker says, only as long as you hear the church bell tolling to announce my death. After that, stop. He describes his death without comfort: he will have fled a vile world to live among even viler worms.
The second quatrain goes further. If you read this poem, he says, do not remember the hand that wrote it. His reason is love: he would rather be forgotten entirely than have the thought of him make the young man sad.
The third quatrain goes further still. If you look at this verse when I have decayed into the earth, do not even say my name, and let your love for me die when I do. The requests have moved from limiting grief, to forgetting the writer, to letting the love itself end.
The couplet then gives a reason the first twelve lines never mentioned. The young man should hide his grief in case the “wise world” sees it and mocks him for having loved the speaker. The request that looked like pure tenderness turns out to be partly a warning: grieving for this man could cost the young man his dignity.
Sonnet 71 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 71 makes one request in three escalating forms, and its themes come from the gap between what the speaker asks and why he asks it.
Forgetting as an Act of Love
Love poets traditionally ask to be remembered. This speaker asks the opposite, and he frames the request as the measure of his devotion: “I love you so / That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot.” He would rather disappear from the young man’s mind than be a source of pain in it. Taken at face value, it is one of the most selfless statements in the sequence.
Self-Contempt and Death
The speaker thinks little of himself and less of his death. The world he leaves is “vile,” his company in the grave “vilest,” his name “poor.” The body will be “compounded with clay,” mixed into the earth until nothing separate remains. That low self-regard makes the request to be forgotten feel natural to him: there is not much, he implies, worth remembering.
The Fear of Public Mockery
The couplet adds a social motive. The “wise world” is worldly-wise, knowing and ready to judge, and it might “look into” the young man’s grief and “mock you with me.” Visible mourning would expose the attachment, and the attachment, the speaker fears, is something the world would laugh at. The poem does not say why. It only makes clear that the speaker sees himself as a liability to the young man’s reputation, alive or dead.
Form and Language
Sonnet 71 is plain in its words and careful in its structure, and most of its effects come from how the requests are staged.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Its vocabulary is unusually simple, with many one-syllable words, which gives it the sound of direct speech rather than display. Each quatrain carries one request, and the couplet carries the reason.
The Escalating Requests
The quatrains form a ladder. The first limits mourning to the tolling of the bell. The second asks the young man to forget the writer. The third asks him not to speak the name and to let the love itself decay. The conditional openings, “if you read this line” and “if, I say, you look upon this verse,” repeat the same imagined scene of the young man reading after the speaker’s death, and each time the request that follows is larger.
“The Surly Sullen Bell”
In Shakespeare’s England a church bell was tolled to announce a death to the parish. The alliteration of “surly sullen” gives the bell a heavy, grudging sound, and the speaker uses it as a clock: grief may last exactly as long as the bell rings and no longer. The public announcement becomes the private limit.
“Vile” and “Vilest”
Line 4 repeats the same word in two forms, a device called polyptoton: the world is “vile,” the worms are “vilest.” Death is pictured as moving from something bad to something worse. The repetition also ties the two halves of the line together, so the world the speaker leaves and the grave he enters belong to the same scale of disgust.
The Couplet’s “Lest”
“Lest” means “for fear that,” and it changes the poem’s logic in one word. Up to line 12, the stated reason for forgetting is love. From line 13, the reason is fear. The couplet does not cancel the earlier motive; it adds a second one beside it, and leaves the reader to weigh the two.
A Closer Reading
Sonnet 71 asks to be forgotten in a form built to be remembered, and it can only be obeyed by not being read.
Consider the conditions the poem sets. “If you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it.” But reading the line is how the hand is remembered. “Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,” yet the poem is a thing people rehearse, recite and repeat. Every instruction to forget is attached to an act of reading, and every act of reading undoes the instruction. The young man could follow the poem’s advice perfectly only by never looking at it again.
The poem is also full of the very things it asks him to forget. The bell, the hand, the verse, the name, the clay: each is set before the reader vividly at the moment the reader is told to let it go. It is hard to forget a bell described as surly and sullen. The poem’s instructions work against its images.
One instruction the poem does keep. It never gives the speaker’s name. The request “do not so much as my poor name rehearse” is honored on the page itself, and in that sense the sonnet partly practices what it asks for. What survives is not the man but the voice, which is exactly the part of him the sequence elsewhere claims will last.
That is where the couplet’s fear sharpens the paradox. Sonnet 55 promises that verse will keep the beloved alive “in the eyes of all posterity.” Sonnet 71 imagines the same posterity as the “wise world,” reading the poem and mocking what it reveals. The durability of verse, which is a comfort when it preserves the young man, becomes a danger when it preserves the speaker’s love for him. The poem asks to be forgotten because it knows it will not be.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 71, answered briefly.
Who Is Sonnet 71 Addressed To?
The young man of the Fair Youth sonnets. The speaker imagines him reading the poem at some point after the speaker has died.
What Is the “Surly Sullen Bell”?
The church bell tolled to tell the parish that someone had died. The speaker allows the young man to grieve only for as long as that bell rings.
Why Does the Speaker Want to Be Forgotten?
He gives two reasons. In lines 6 to 8 it is love: he would rather be forgotten than cause the young man sorrow. In the couplet it is fear: visible grief might lead the world to mock the young man for his attachment to the speaker.
What Does “Compounded Am With Clay” Mean?
Mixed with the earth. It describes the body decaying in the grave until it becomes part of the soil, with an echo of the old idea that humans are made from clay and return to it.
Is Sonnet 71 Part of a Group?
Yes. Sonnets 71 to 74 all imagine the speaker’s death. Sonnet 72 follows directly, opening with the same word and the same fear: “O, lest the world should task you to recite / What merit lived in me.”
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets take up the question of who should be remembered, and how.