In Sonnet 31, the beloved becomes a living grave for every lost love
Shakespeare's speaker has mourned old friends and lovers as dead. Then he discovers they were never gone: every one of them lives on inside the person he now loves. Sonnet 31 turns a friend's chest into a tomb hung with trophies, and ends with a line that tangles the word all into a knot.
The sonnet opens with a reversal. The beloved's bosom holds all the hearts the speaker had given up for dead, and Love reigns there together with every friend he thought buried. Grief, it turns out, was a misunderstanding. What he took for absence was only relocation.
The second quatrain looks back at the tears. Religious love, the speaker says, stole many holy and dutiful tears from his eyes, paid out like interest owed to the dead. The financial image is typical of the sonnets, which often count feeling in the language of debts and accounts. Now those tears seem wasted, because the dead were merely moved and lie hidden in the beloved.
The central image arrives in line nine: "Thou art the grave where buried love doth live". It is a paradox, a grave that keeps things alive, decorated with trophies of earlier lovers who each surrendered their share of the speaker to this one person. What many once claimed now belongs to one. The couplet compresses the whole idea into a tongue-twister, "hast all the all of me", in which the beloved stands for every past attachment at once.
Loss was not an abstraction in Shakespeare's household. He married Anne Hathaway at 18, and their only son, Hamnet, a twin to his sister Judith, was baptised in February 1585. Hamnet died at 11, of causes nobody recorded, and was buried on 11 August 1596. Few records of the playwright's private life survive, so nothing ties this poem to that death, and readers should be wary of drawing a line between them. Still, the sonnet's insistence that the dead persist in the living reads differently once that date is known.
Source: Sonnet 31: Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts
