Sonnet 30 treats grief like a debt you keep repaying
Memory in Sonnet 30 works like a courtroom and a counting house. The speaker summons old losses to a hearing, then pays for each sorrow again as if the bill were new. Only the final couplet cancels the account, and it does so with a single thought of one dear friend.
The first line borrows legal language: sessions were sittings of a court, and the speaker summons up remembrance as if calling witnesses. The silence of the thought is sweet, but what he calls before it is not pleasant. He sighs over things he wanted and never got and laments, with fresh cries, time he has wasted.
The middle of the poem is a ledger of grief. His eyes, unused to weeping, now drown for friends hidden in death's dateless night. He weeps again for heartbreaks long since cancelled and mourns the expense of sights that have vanished. The language of accounts keeps returning: he tells over, meaning counts, the sad sum of moans already moaned, and pays it anew as though never paid before. The heavy alliteration of woe to woe and moan after moan makes the lines themselves drag, as if the reader were carrying the weight.
Then the turn. If he thinks of the dear friend for even a moment, every loss is restored and every sorrow ends. Fourteen lines of mounting debt are wiped clean in two. The effect depends on how thoroughly the grief was built up first.
There is a certain irony in a poem about recalling the past coming from a writer whose own past is so patchy. Between the baptism of his twins in 1585 and his appearance on the London theatre scene in 1592, Shakespeare barely shows up in documents, a stretch scholars call the lost years. Legends filled the gap. Nicholas Rowe, his first biographer, repeated a Stratford tale that he fled town after poaching deer from the squire Thomas Lucy; John Aubrey claimed he had been a country schoolmaster. Little besides hearsay gathered after his death supports any of these stories.
Source: Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
