Sonnet 51 Thus Can My Love Excuse The Slow Offence - Analysis

Love as a Lawyer for Slowness

The sonnet’s central claim is cheekily simple: love can justify opposite behaviors. When the speaker departs, love becomes an advocate that excuse[s] the slow offence of his dull bearer—the horse that carries him away. The logic is almost legalistic: if he is leaving from where thou art, why rush? The beloved’s presence makes the destination elsewhere feel like a kind of exile, so the horse’s slowness becomes not failure but fidelity. The tone here is playful and indulgent, as if the speaker is gently forgiving a servant who is only doing what the heart secretly wants.

The Turn: When Slowness Becomes Unforgivable

Midway, the poem pivots sharply from pardon to pressure: O, what excuse will the horse have then, when the speaker is returning? The tenderness of letting the horse dawdle turns into a near-comic impatience where even maximum speed will feel insufficient: swift extremity can seem but slow. That line makes the poem’s emotional physics clear: distance from the beloved dilates time; movement toward the beloved compresses it. What was once no need for posting becomes a need so intense it redefines what counts as motion.

From Horseflesh to Wind: Desire Outruns the Body

To dramatize that impatience, Shakespeare escalates the image from animal to element. The speaker will spur even if mounted on the wind, and in wingèd speed he will feel no motion—as if velocity itself becomes invisible compared to longing. The key tension is bodily limitation versus inward urgency: no horse can keep pace with what the speaker calls my desire. The horse is real, heavy, and finite; desire is a kind of supernatural engine that makes any physical transport look inadequate.

Desire, Love, and the Insulted Horse

The sonnet complicates itself by splitting the speaker’s motive into two close but not identical forces: desire and love. Desire is described as of perfect’st love being made, suggesting it’s not merely lust or impatience but love condensed into a more frantic form. Yet desire also turns contemptuous: it will neigh no dull flesh in its fiery race, treating the horse’s body as an insult to the soul’s speed. The horse becomes a scapegoat for the speaker’s own divided state—partly tender enough to pardon, partly so hungry to return that it lashes out at whatever cannot keep up.

A Love That Forgives Both Directions

The closing couplet performs the poem’s neatest trick: it forgives the horse twice, for opposite reasons. Love, for love will excuse my jade—the tired, ordinary horse—because when leaving, he went wilful-slow, and when returning, the speaker himself will run: Towards thee I’ll run, giving the animal leave to go. The tenderness returns, but changed: the speaker’s solution is not to demand the impossible speed of horseflesh, but to take the strain onto his own body. Love’s final expression is a kind of self-overruling: the heart refuses to blame the carrier when the real problem is the distance itself.

The Uncomfortable Question Hiding in the Joke

When the speaker says he will run while the horse is allowed to go, it sounds romantic—but it also hints at something harsher. If no horse can match his desire, what human pace ever could? The poem’s comedy about a poor beast quietly exposes a more unsettling truth: the beloved has become a measure so absolute that even mounted on the wind would still feel slow.