Sonnet 74 claims that the young man loses almost nothing when the speaker dies, because the part of the speaker worth keeping, his spirit, lives on in this poem, while death takes only a worthless body.
Sonnet 74: Full Poem
But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away;
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead;
The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
The worth of that is that which it contains,
And that is this, and this with thee remains.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 74 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 74 Means
Sonnet 74 begins with “But,” which ties it to the poem before it. Sonnet 73 ends with the young man’s love made stronger by the thought of what he “must leave ere long.” Sonnet 74 answers that sadness with “But be contented”: the loss will be smaller than it looks.
The first quatrain describes death as an arrest. When that “fell,” or cruel, officer carries the speaker off “Without all bail,” with no chance of release, something will still stay behind. The speaker’s life has “some interest,” a share or stake, in “this line,” meaning this verse, and the verse will remain with the young man as a “memorial.”
The second quatrain explains why the poem is worth keeping. Whenever the young man rereads it, he will be reviewing “The very part was consecrate to thee,” the part of the speaker that was dedicated to him. The earth can claim only earth, the body, which is its due. The speaker’s “spirit,” “the better part of me,” belongs to the young man.
The third quatrain turns to what death does take, and dismisses it. The body is only “the dregs of life,” the leftover sediment, “The prey of worms,” something any wretch with a knife could conquer, and “Too base” for the young man to remember. The couplet sums up in a riddle of pronouns. The body’s worth lies in what it contains, the spirit, and that spirit is “this,” the poem, which “with thee remains.”
Sonnet 74 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 74 divides the speaker into two parts, and its themes follow from where each part goes.
Death as Arrest
The opening imagines death as an officer of the law who seizes the speaker and refuses bail. The same figure appears in Hamlet, when the dying prince says he would speak if he had time, “as this fell sergeant, Death, / Is strict in his arrest.” In the sonnet, the legal language continues into “interest,” a word for a share or claim in property. Death may take the person, but it cannot cancel the speaker’s stake in his verse.
Body and Spirit
The poem sorts the speaker into a worthless body and a precious spirit. The body goes to the earth, which “can have but earth,” a phrase that recalls the familiar words of the burial service. The spirit goes to the young man. This division is old and religious in outline, but the sonnet gives it a secular twist. The spirit does not rise to heaven. It goes into a poem and stays with a friend.
Poetry as Survival
Many of the Fair Youth sonnets promise that verse will preserve the young man, as in Sonnet 55, where “you shall shine more bright in these contents.” Sonnet 74 applies the same promise to the poet. Here it is the speaker who survives in “this line.” This reverses the mood of Sonnet 72, where he asks for his name to be buried with his body, and it gives the death group of Sonnets 71 to 74 a consoling end.
Form and Language
Sonnet 74 draws on the language of law and property, and it ends by pointing at itself.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem follows the usual Shakespearean pattern of three quatrains and a couplet in iambic pentameter. The rhyme of “arrest” with “interest” falls on the final syllable of “interest,” a light syllable that the meter stresses. The same thing happens when “dead” rhymes with “remembered,” where the final “-ed” has to be sounded to fill out the line. Both rhymes sit on weak syllables, which suits a poem about what remains after the main thing is gone.
Legal Language
“Arrest,” “bail,” and “interest” belong to law and finance. The speaker treats his death as a seizure by a creditor and his poem as a holding that the seizure cannot touch. The word “consecrate,” meaning dedicated or set apart as sacred, adds a religious note to the legal one, so that the poem becomes both property and relic.
“This” and “That”
The couplet is built almost entirely from pointing words: “The worth of that is that which it contains, / And that is this, and this with thee remains.” The first “that” is the body, “that which it contains” is the spirit, and “this” is the poem the young man holds. The tangle of pronouns asks the reader to work out the equation, and the last line ends on the poem itself. Like the “this line” of line 3, the couplet is a self-referential moment in which the sonnet names itself as the thing that survives.
“The Coward Conquest of a Wretch’s Knife”
Line 11 is the poem’s harshest description of the body. It is a “coward conquest,” a victory that takes no courage, because anyone could win it with a knife. Some readers take the knife to be death’s or time’s, comparing “confounding age’s cruel knife” in Sonnet 63. Others take it more literally as the knife of any murderer. Either way, the line insists that the body is easily destroyed and not worth mourning.
A Closer Reading
Sonnet 74 consoles the young man by shrinking the speaker’s death, but it does so by asking the poem to carry more of the speaker than a poem can easily hold.
The argument is tidy. The speaker has two parts. Death gets the worse part, the young man gets the better part, and the better part is in his hands as he reads. The consolation depends on treating the body with open contempt: “dregs,” “prey of worms,” “coward conquest,” and “Too base” to be remembered. The harder the speaker is on his body, the less there is to grieve.
That contempt is also a strategy. Sonnet 73 moves the young man to love the speaker more because he will soon lose him. Sonnet 74 tries to remove the grief without removing the love. It tells the young man that what he loves was never the body anyway. It was “The very part was consecrate to thee,” the spirit that went into the verse. The poem flatters the young man too. It implies that his love is fixed on the best thing about the speaker, not the worst.
The couplet makes the boldest move. By saying “that is this,” the speaker equates his spirit with the poem on the page. The claim depends on a reader who comes to it with love, as the young man does, and can find the speaker’s spirit in it. To a stranger, it may be fourteen lines of verse and little more. The poem’s comfort is therefore private and depends on the reader the speaker is addressing.
Read after Sonnet 72, the poem looks like a correction. There, the speaker is ashamed of “that which I bring forth” and wants his name buried. Here, what he brings forth is “the better part of me.” The two poems sit side by side without resolving the difference, and that tension is part of what makes the death group feel like the record of a mind changing its view of its own work.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 74, answered briefly.
Who Is Sonnet 74 Addressed To?
The young man of the Fair Youth sonnets. Sonnets 1 to 126 are generally read as addressed to him, and this poem replies directly to the close of Sonnet 73.
What Is the “Fell Arrest” in Sonnet 74?
Death. “Fell” means cruel or deadly, and the speaker pictures death as an officer arresting him “Without all bail,” with no chance of release.
What Does “The Better Part of Me” Mean?
It means the speaker’s spirit, as opposed to his body. He says that his spirit belongs to the young man and survives in the poem.
What Does the Couplet of Sonnet 74 Mean?
The worth of the body is the spirit it holds, and that spirit is this poem, which stays with the young man after the body is gone.
Where Is the Volta in Sonnet 74?
At line 9, with “So then.” The first eight lines describe what remains with the young man, and the sestet turns to what death takes, the body, and dismisses it.
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets share this poem’s thinking about death and the survival of verse.