In Sonnet 28, day and night shake hands to torment a lover
Day and night are natural rivals, yet in Sonnet 28 they strike a deal against one miserable man. Daylight wears him out with travel; darkness makes him brood over how far he still is from the person he loves. He tries flattering both of them, and it gets him nowhere.
The poem opens with a question that assumes we already know the speaker's trouble: how can he come home in good spirits when he is shut out from rest? Its first word, "How", and the little word "then" suggest an argument already under way, picking up the sleeplessness of the sonnet before it. Night fails to relieve the strain of day, so each simply presses on the other in turn.
The central image is political. Day and night rule separate kingdoms and are enemies, but here they agree, shaking hands in a pact to torture him. Their division of labour is precise: one works him hard, while the other makes him lament that all his effort only carries him farther from the beloved.
In the third quatrain he attempts diplomacy. He tells the day that the beloved is bright enough to stand in for the sun when clouds cover the sky, and he tells the dark-skinned night that the beloved gilds the evening when the stars fail to twinkle. The compliments are really praise of the absent person smuggled into flattery of his tormentors. The couplet admits defeat, with a chiming repetition that stretches the line out just as grief does: "But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer, / And night doth nightly make grief's length seem stronger."
Shakespeare, often called the Bard of Avon, married Anne Hathaway at 18 and had three children, Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a London career as actor, writer and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men. Around 1613 he seems to have retired to Stratford, dying in 1616. Seven years later two fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, gathered 36 of his plays in the First Folio.
Source: Sonnet 28: How can I then return in happy plight
