Sonnet 31: Thy Bosom Is Endearèd with All Hearts
Sonnet 31: Thy Bosom Is Endearèd with All Hearts - meaning Summary
Love Lives in Another's Heart
The speaker addresses a beloved whose heart seems to hold every love the speaker once had and thought lost. Past affections are not dead but live preserved within this person, who bears the 'trophies' and images of former lovers. The poem explores how one beloved can contain and revive scattered attachments, making the speaker’s previous loves present again through identification with that single intimate locus.
Read Complete AnalysesThy bosom is endearèd with all hearts, Which I by lacking have supposèd dead, And there reigns love and all love’s loving parts, And all those friends which I thought burièd. How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye As interest of the dead, which now appear But things removed that hidden in thee lie! Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give; That due of many now is thine alone. Their images I loved, I view in thee, And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.
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