Sonnet 41: Those Pretty Wrongs That Liberty Commits
Sonnet 41: Those Pretty Wrongs That Liberty Commits - form Summary
Sonnet Form Frames Moral Plea
This poem uses the Shakespearean sonnet form—three quatrains and a final rhymed couplet—to stage a speaker’s argument about a beloved’s attractiveness and infidelity. Each quatrain develops a different aspect of excuse: beauty as temptation, kindness as vulnerability, and youth as excuse. The concluding couplet delivers the moral pivot, naming a twofold wrong: the beloved’s beauty draws another while that same beauty makes the beloved false to the speaker.
Read Complete AnalysesThose pretty wrongs that liberty commits When I am sometime absent from thy heart, Thy beauty and thy years full well befits, For still temptation follows where thou art. Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won; Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed; And when a woman woos, what woman’s son Will sourly leave her till he have prevailed? Ay me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear, And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth, Who lead thee in their riot even there Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth: Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee, Thine, by thy beauty being false to me.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.