Sonnet 136 If Thy Soul Check Thee That I Come So Near - Analysis

A seduction built out of a loophole

The sonnet’s central move is simple and sly: the speaker tries to turn the beloved’s possible moral resistance into a technicality. If her soul check thee that I come, he proposes she should Swear to her own blind soul that he was her Will. In other words, he offers her a way to let him in without feeling she has truly chosen him; she can tell herself she has only admitted a word, a “will,” rather than a person with consequences. The poem is playful on the surface, but its play is a strategy for getting consent by redefining what counts as consent.

The punning on Will (desire, intention, and the name William) isn’t just a joke; it becomes the speaker’s argument. He asks her to treat him as an abstract principle—her “will”—so that desire can masquerade as inevitability.

Thy blind soul: flattering her innocence while exploiting it

Calling the beloved’s soul blind sounds like a compliment to purity, but it also sets up the speaker’s advantage: blindness can be guided. The phrase Swear to thy blind soul is oddly legalistic and inward; she must make an oath to herself, not to him. That inward oath is the poem’s pressure point, because it relocates the conflict from external ethics (what she should do) to internal rationalization (what she can tell herself).

Even the line Thus far for love tries to soften what is essentially a negotiated entry: he frames the proposed self-deception as an act of love, not a convenient story.

Love as a store’s account: the arithmetic of desire

Midway, the poem turns to metaphors of storage and accounting: treasure, receipt, number, store’s account. The speaker claims that love is a kind of capacious container: fill it full with wills, with his will merely one among many. If she can admit “wills” in general—desires, lovers, pleasures—why not add his?

This is where the poem’s tone becomes cheerfully transactional. The beloved’s love is treated like a vault with room, and the speaker’s aim is to be entered as a small, deniable line item rather than a full moral event.

The turn: from being one to being none

A sharper shift arrives with the claim Among a number one is reckoned none. This is the speaker’s boldest contradiction: he wants to be included, yet he argues that inclusion should not count. In the sestet, he presses it further: let me pass untold, though I one must be. The poem’s emotional hinge is here: he asks the beloved to accept him while agreeing to overlook the meaning of accepting him.

That doubleness creates the sonnet’s central tension. The speaker both asserts himself—he wants closeness, he come[s] so near—and attempts to erase himself into arithmetic, where a single unit can be treated as negligible.

Nothing me, a something: self-erasure as persuasion

The couplet’s approach is prepared by the strangest plea in the poem: For nothing hold me, as long as she will please thee hold That nothing me, a something, to her. The speaker offers to be “nothing” socially or morally—no claim, no public weight—if privately he can be “something.” The line plays like a paradox, but it also maps a real arrangement: secrecy, minimization, plausible deniability.

That makes the seduction feel simultaneously comic and bleak. The speaker is willing to shrink himself to get what he wants, yet that willingness also pressures the beloved: if he is “nothing,” then why refuse?

The final trick: love the name, not the man

The closing couplet seals the argument by collapsing identity into a label: Make but my name thy love, and then thou lov’st me because my name is Will. It’s a neat verbal loop, but it also reveals the speaker’s underlying desire to be unavoidable. If “Will” is what she already loves—will as desire—then loving him becomes tautological, almost automatic.

Yet the poem can’t fully hide its anxiety. The repeated bargaining, the reliance on counting and loopholes, suggests the beloved’s resistance is real. The sonnet’s wit is not carefree; it is the sound of someone trying to talk past a conscience—hers, and maybe his.

A sharper question the poem forces

If the beloved must swear to her blind soul that this is only Will, what does that imply about what the speaker is actually asking for? The poem’s comedy depends on pretending the difference between “name,” “desire,” and “person” is thin. But the very need to blur those lines admits the opposite: the difference is exactly where the moral weight lies.