Sonnet 70 That Thou Art Blamed Shall Not Be Thy Defect - Analysis

Beauty as a Target, Not a Flaw

The sonnet’s central claim is bluntly consoling: if you’re being blamed, that blame doesn’t prove you deserve it. The speaker argues that slander is almost a predictable side effect of beauty, not evidence of moral failure. From the opening, blame is detached from defect: That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect. The reason is social and almost mechanical: slander’s mark has always been the fair. In this logic, the more visibly admirable someone is, the more likely people are to try to smudge that admiration.

The metaphor that follows makes the point with a dark flick of humor. Beauty, called The ornament, becomes suspect—as if attractiveness itself looks guilty. Then comes the startling image: A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air. The crow suggests something black and noisy intruding on a pure space. Slander, in other words, is not a rebuttal to beauty but a stain that arrives precisely where the air is sweetest—where there’s most to spoil.

When Slander Approves Worth

Having framed blame as inevitable, the speaker turns it into evidence of value—so long as the beloved is genuinely good. So thou be good becomes the condition under which slander paradoxically approves worth. The idea is not that lies are good, but that the existence of slander signals that something worth envying is present: your worth looks the greater because it is wooed of time, pursued and tested across time rather than being a brief shine.

Shakespeare sharpens this with a botanical image that feels almost cruel in its accuracy: canker vice loves the sweetest buds. Rot doesn’t go for what’s already withered; corruption is attracted to what is most promising. Against that, the beloved is described as a pure unstainèd prime, a phrase that makes youth sound like an unspoiled first edition. The compliment is intense: not merely attractive, but still in an original state, apparently untouched by the grime that normally clings to beauty.

The Sonnet’s Turn: Praise That Can’t Stop Envy

The mood shifts when the poem looks back over the beloved’s youth: Thou hast passed by the ambush of young days. Youth becomes a battlefield with traps—temptations, scandals, careless mistakes. The beloved has made it through Either not assailed or else victor being charged: either no one attacked, or attacks happened and were defeated. Up to this point, the speaker is building a near-perfect portrait: beauty that attracts slander, goodness that defeats it, and a youth that emerges clean.

Then comes the hinge: Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise, because it can’t tie up envy. That phrase—tie up—is practical and almost weary, like trying to bind a thing that keeps writhing loose. Envy is described as evermore enlarged, not satisfied by facts, not quieted by proven innocence. The sonnet turns from reassuring the beloved to admitting a harsher truth about the world: people do not need real evidence to resent; resentment grows on its own.

The Disturbing Couplets: The Usefulness of a Masked Fault

The closing couplet makes the poem’s most unsettling argument. It suggests that a suspect of ill—some shadow of wrongdoing—actually helps regulate desire and devotion. If no suspicion masked the beloved’s show (their outward appearance, their public face), then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe. In other words, pure, unquestioned perfection would draw universal allegiance. The poem implies that the world cannot bear unblemished excellence; a faint rumor of blemish spreads the emotional economy around, preventing one person from monopolizing love and admiration.

This creates a sharp tension with the earlier praise of pure unstainèd prime. The speaker wants the beloved to be genuinely good, yet also recognizes that goodness alone cannot control how others see them. Even worse, the final logic suggests that a hint of ugliness in reputation functions as a kind of social safety valve. The beloved’s public image ends up governed not just by virtue, but by the appetites of onlookers—especially those who can’t stand to see a crowless sky.

A Question the Poem Won’t Let Go Of

If envy is evermore enlarged, what exactly is the beloved being asked to do—live well, or manage perception? The poem comforts by saying blame isn’t defect, but it also hints that suspicion is almost necessary to keep the world from over-worshipping. That raises an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps the beloved’s innocence is less powerful than the crowd’s need to believe there’s ill somewhere behind the show.

What the Sonnet Finally Consoles—and What It Admits

By the end, the sonnet offers a consolation with teeth. It tells the beloved not to mistake slander for proof of guilt, because slander hunts the fair and the sweetest buds. But it also admits that praise can’t solve the deeper problem: admiration always breeds its opposite, and even a pure person moves through a world that prefers a little stain in the story. The poem’s tenderness lies in its realism: it defends the beloved’s worth while refusing to pretend that worth will ever be the last word.