The Full Text of “Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”
1When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
2I summon up remembrance of things past,
3I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
4And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
5Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
6For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
7And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
8And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;
9Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
10And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
11The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
12Which I new pay as if not paid before.
13But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
14All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.
The Full Text of “Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”
1When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
2I summon up remembrance of things past,
3I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
4And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
5Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
6For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
7And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
8And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;
9Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
10And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
11The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
12Which I new pay as if not paid before.
13But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
14All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.
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“Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” Introduction
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“Sonnet 30” was written by the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare. First published in 1609 as part of a sequence of 154 sonnets, “Sonnet 30” was most likely written in the early 1590s. At this time, Shakespeare was a young playwright, recently arrived in London. Despite its author’s youth and inexperience, the poem broods on life's disappointments. For the speaker of the poem, even thinking about such sorrows brings them back with all their original pain and power. Only one thing offers solace and comfort in the face of such pain—the love the speaker feels for a “dear friend.”
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“Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” Summary
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When I’m silently reflecting on things that have happened in the past, I feel disappointed that I failed to get the things I wanted. Old sorrows feel new again, and I complain about how I wasted my precious time. Then I can weep heavily, even though I rarely cry, for dear friends who have died; I can weep again for lost loves I'd once gotten over; I can complain about things that have been destroyed. Then I get angry about old insults, and I complain about one bad thing after another: a sad tale of things I’ve already complained about, which feel as painful now as they did before. But, if I stop and think about you, dear friend, everything I’ve lost returns to me and all my sorrows end.
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“Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” Themes
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The Pain of Memory
In “Sonnet 30,” the speaker rehashes all the injuries and disappointments of life: dead friends, lost pleasures, squandered opportunities. For the speaker, neither memory nor time itself diminishes the pain of these losses: just to think about them brings them back in their full power and difficulty. Indeed, the speaker suggests that memory itself is a powerful source of pain.
The speaker of “Sonnet 30” has a lot of regrets and disappointments. And as soon as the speaker starts to reminisce about “things past,” these regrets and disappointments come flocking in, overwhelming the speaker. The speaker broods over “the lack of many a thing I sought”—in other words, about missed opportunities. The speaker also weeps over old friends, long dead: “Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, / For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.” The speaker grieves lost loves too: “love’s long since cancelled woe.” The first 12 lines of the poem thus constitute a long, exhaustive list of all the things the speaker grieves and regrets.
Strikingly, these disappointments and sorrows don’t seem to have faded with time. Time usually takes the sting out of grief and disappointment, but that’s not the case for this speaker. The speaker no sooner thinks of some “fore-bemoaned moan” than the speaker has to “new pay as if not paid before.” In other words, the speaker endures the pain all over again—and it feels just as fresh and sharp as before; it is as though no time has passed at all.
The first 12 lines of the poem are thus dark and full of despair. The speaker occupies a world in which no one ever really heals, where hurt and pain last forever without subsiding or becoming bearable. And reflecting on the past—remembering it—only brings that pain back with all its power and difficulty.
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The Power of Love
The speaker of “Sonnet 30” spends most of the poem in despair: obsessively meditating on past disappointments, regrets, and sorrows. The speaker can’t find any relief: even the passage of time doesn’t heal these wounds. As we discuss in this guide's theme entry on “The Pain of Memory,” remembering these griefs is like enduring their pain all over again. But in the final two lines of the poem, the speaker finally announces that there is something that makes up for all these losses and disappointments: love.
After the speaker’s intense despair in the first 12 lines, the couplet that closes the poem provides a sudden and unexpected relief. The speaker reveals that there is a way to compensate for disappointment and sorrow. All the speaker has to do is think about “thee,” a “dear friend”—and “all losses are restored, and sorrows end.” In other words, the speaker feels powerfully about the “dear friend”—so powerfully that simply thinking about this “dear friend” is enough to dispel the obsessive negative thoughts that pursue the speaker.
“Sonnet 30” on its own doesn’t tell the reader who the “dear friend” is or what kind of relationship the “dear friend” has with the speaker. It could be read simply as a poem in praise of the transformative power of friendship—which alone, it seems, can heal the wounds that life inflicts. But in the broader context of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, it’s clear who this “dear friend” is: he’s the beautiful young man whom Shakespeare's speaker obsessively courts and praises in sonnets 1-126.
In other words, the speaker of this poem—if the reader takes the poem in the broader context of the sequence—isn’t just saying that friendship makes things better. Rather the speaker is insisting that love—passionate, erotic love between two people—supplies all the pleasure, hope, and solace necessary to survive life’s disappointments and sorrows.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”
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Lines 1-4
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:The first four lines of “Sonnet 30” establish one of the poem’s themes and its form. The poem begins with the speaker reminiscing, thinking about “things past.” The speaker describes this act of reminiscing with an evocative and suggestive metaphor. The speaker describes thought itself—“sweet silent thought”—as “sessions.” In Renaissance England, where the poem was written, the word “sessions” had a specific technical meaning: it refers to court sessions, the period of the year when magistrates and judges heard legal cases. The metaphor thus suggests that the speaker experiences “sweet silent thought” as a kind of tribunal: a place of trial and questioning. The metaphor might even suggest that the speaker starts the poem feeling guilty.
Indeed, as becomes clear in lines 3-4, the speaker’s memories are not pleasant. Instead of returning to happy times, the speaker focuses on “old woes”: disappointments and failures from the past. For the speaker, just thinking about these things is enough to bring them back with all their painful power. And so the speaker “new wail[s]” them. In other words, the speaker grieves the “lack of many a thing I sought” and “my dear time’s waste” again. Just remembering these failures and wasted opportunities is enough to send the speaker into a spiral of regret and self-recrimination.
The tone of these opening lines is thus dark and brooding: they are full of guilt, grief, and disappointment. But the poem itself is exceptionally elegant and refined. That creates some tension for the reader. For example, line 4 contains a strong alliterative /w/ sound in “woes,” “wail,” and “waste.” The /w/ sound underlines the way old and new overlap, the way the speaker tries—and fails—to get over the past. The assonant /o/ sound in the line, in “old woes,” also emphasizes the speaker’s grief: it sounds like someone moaning. But these sounds work in a highly literary, even artificial way. Though the poem describes despair and disillusionment, it remains powerfully controlled and organized.
This control is reflected in the poem’s form. “Sonnet 30” is a Shakespearean sonnet. It follows a strict rhyme scheme—the first twelve lines form three rhyming quatrains and follow an ABAB pattern. The poem also follows an equally strict meter, iambic pentameter. The speaker’s pensive meditative mood is further underlined throughout by the speaker’s use of end-stop: almost all of the poem’s lines are end-stopped, as though the speaker were hesitating, procrastinating. One of the only exceptions comes in the poem’s first line, which is enjambed. That enjambment gives the opening of the poem a sense of energy and sprightliness that quickly fades as the speaker wades deeper and deeper into despair.
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Lines 5-8
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight; -
Lines 9-12
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before. -
Lines 13-14
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.
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“Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” Symbols
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Night
Night is a symbol of the afterlife, the place where the dead go. For the speaker, death is dark, timeless space: it is “dateless.” There is no hope or light in it. Once someone sinks into death, they are lost forever—they cannot be restored to life. This symbol of the afterlife thus links to the overall sense of despair, of hopelessness, the speaker feels in the first 12 lines of the poem.
This treatment of the afterlife is remarkably atheistic for a poem written in a culture where regular attendance at church was mandatory. The speaker emphatically does not imagine these “precious friends” in Heaven, enjoying eternal life. Indeed, the symbol may be said to exclude the Christian hope of resurrection from the poem. Only love itself—erotic love—can restore the loss the speaker feels so intensely.
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“Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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End-Stopped Line
Most of the lines in “Sonnet 30” are end-stopped. (Indeed, the poem has only two enjambments, in lines 1 and 10.) This gives the poem a slow pace and a meditative feeling. Pausing at the end of most lines, the speaker feels exhausted, overwhelmed by despair and regret, unable to keep going.
That feeling is especially strong in lines 5-8:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;Here the speaker describes a series of sorrows—the death of “precious friends,” lost loves, etc. Each line introduces a new grief or disappointment. And each line is end-stopped. The end-stops slow these lines down: each line is pensive and heavy. As a result, it almost feels like the speaker is hesitating at the end of each line—delaying the next line, avoiding discussing the next form of grief or sorrow.
End-stop generally works this way in the poem: slowing it down, emphasizing the speaker’s sorrow and regret. In the final couplet of the poem, however it plays a different function. Both of the final two lines are end-stopped:
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.Here the end-stops—particularly in the final line of the poem—communicate certainty, confidence, and finality. The speaker has no doubts about the power of love, its capacity to restore losses and end sorrows. Although these lines are end-stopped, the end-stops function differently than they do in the rest of the poem: no longer expressing sorrow and regret, they embody the speaker's confidence in the power of love.
Line 13, however, could also be considered an instance of enjambment, since the meaning of the phrase ("if the while I think on thee") isn't completed until the next line. However, the incompleteness doesn't convey uncertainty. Rather, it suggests excitement. Again, this contributes to the overall confidence in love that the final couplet talks about.
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Metaphor
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Apostrophe
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Polyptoton
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"Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Sessions
- Remembrance
- Lack
- Old Woes
- New Wail
- Drown An Eye
- Unus'd
- Dateless
- Afresh
- Th'expense
- Foregone
- O'er
- Fore-bemoaned
- Thee
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Court proceedings. In early modern England, judges would sit to hear cases for limited, regularly scheduled, periods called “sessions.”
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”
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Form
“Sonnet 30” is a Shakespearean sonnet. That means it follows a set form. The poem has 14 lines in a single stanza, it’s written in iambic pentameter, and it has a distinctive rhyme scheme. Although Shakespeare didn’t invent the Shakespearean sonnet, he did popularize it. (And he wrote more than 150 of them in his lifetime, making him the acknowledged master of the form.) The Shakespearean sonnet is divided into two sections: the first 12 lines—which can be broken down further into quatrains—and the final 2 lines, which form a rhyming couplet.
The shift between lines 12 and 13 is called the volta. That’s an Italian word, which means “turn.” It marks a point where things shift: the speaker pauses to reconsider the poem’s argument, to propose a new idea. The volta falls very late in a Shakespearean sonnet. The speaker only has two lines to reconsider things, to propose new ideas—and so the voltas of Shakespearean sonnets often feel forced and unconvincing. On the other hand, sometimes this abrupt artificiality can contribute to the poem's overall effect. By contrast, in the Petrarchan sonnet—an older form—the volta falls between lines 8 and 9, giving the speaker much longer to develop a counter-argument, to change his or her mind.
In “Sonnet 30,” the speaker spends most of the poem describing setbacks, sorrows, and regrets. And while the speaker does proclaim in lines 13-14 that love “restor[es]” “all losses,” a reader might feel like the power of the speaker’s sorrows outweighs this hasty and conventional ending.
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Meter
“Sonnet 30” is written in iambic pentameter, the standard meter for a Shakespearean sonnet. Iambic pentameter has a duh DUM rhythm, with five poetic feet in each line. The reader can hear this rhythm in line 5:
Then can | I drown | an eye, | unus’d | to flow,
Pioneered by earlier English poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Thomas Wyatt, iambic pentameter became popular and widely used during the 1580s and 1590s—when Shakespeare was first cutting his teeth as a poet and playwright. Iambic pentameter is a prestigious and important meter; using it in a sonnet, Shakespeare suggests that he takes his topic seriously—that he considers the speaker’s struggles to be dignified and weighty.
Shakespeare is one of the acknowledged masters of iambic pentameter. The reader can see that mastery in the way he works metrical variations into the poem. These variations keep the rhythm of the poem lively, without upsetting its overall flow—or attracting too much attention to themselves. For example, line 3 contains an anapest midway through the line:
I sigh | the lack | of man- | y a thing | I sought,
The anapest gives the line a slight hiccup, a slight syncopation—but it doesn’t distract the reader or call too much attention to itself. Shakespeare is able to maintain a strong rhythm throughout the poem while also incorporating the variations necessary to keep the poem lively and engaging.
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Rhyme Scheme
“Sonnet 30” follows the traditional rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet:
ABABCDCDEFEFGG
In other words, even though the poem is one continuous stanza, it can be broken up into smaller units. The first twelve lines divide into three rhyming quatrains. The final two lines of the poem are a rhyming couplet. The poem thus shifts, formally, between lines 12 and 13.
The final two lines of the poem become a place for the speaker of the poem to reflect on the previous twelve lines—sometimes reinforcing their arguments and sometimes, as in “Sonnet 30” using them as a place to introduce new ideas. This is called the volta, or the turn. The introduction of the rhyming couplet (GG) as opposed to the alternating rhymes of the rest of the sonnet (e.g., ABAB) captures that shift.
The rhymes in “Sonnet 30” are strong and straightforward. Although the rhyme between “past” and “waste” in lines 2 and 4 and the rhyme between “foregone” and “moan” in lines 9 and 11 sound like slant rhymes to modern ears, they wouldn’t have to Shakespeare: English pronunciation has changed since he wrote the poem. For Shakespeare’s early readers, these would’ve been perfect rhymes. The formal polish of the poem, with its strong iambic pentameter and its clear, strong rhymes thus stands in tension with the speaker's powerful sense of disappointment, even despair.
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“Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” Speaker
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The speaker of “Sonnet 30” is full of regrets, disappointments, and sorrows. Over the course of the poem’s first twelve lines, the speaker outlines those griefs in detail, moving from frustrated ambition to grief over the deaths of "precious friends." The speaker seems obsessed with these setbacks and regrets. They don’t get easier over time: whenever the speaker remembers them, they are just as painful.
However, the speaker also has a “dear friend”—someone whom the speaker cares about deeply. And the speaker feels so strongly about this “dear friend” that just thinking about them is enough to wash away sorrow, loss, and regret. In the broader context of Shakespeare’s Sonnets—a sequence of 154 poems—this “dear friend” is a beautiful young man with for whom the speaker has a deep, homoerotic passion, and with whom the speaker has a complicated, difficult love affair. At the heart of “Sonnet 30,” then, is an eloquent testament to the power of love—which, the speaker argues, can repair any injury or disappointment.
It is worth noting that many readers treat Shakespeare's Sonnets as an autobiographical document. In other words, they assume that the speaker of the Sonnets—including "Sonnet 30" —is Shakespeare himself. There are some hints in the historical record that line up with the arguments and characters that appear in the Sonnets. But there is no evidence in the poems themselves that they are autobiographical, or even written directly in Shakespeare's voice.
Additionally, much of the narrative, or story, that critics see in the Sonnets depends on the order in which they were first printed, in 1609. But there's no evidence that Shakespeare was actually involved in the publication of his own poems; many critics suspect the 1609 edition of being a piracy. So the reader should be cautious when attempting to read "Sonnet 30"—or any of Shakespeare's other sonnets—as evidence about Shakespeare's own life.
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“Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” Setting
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In the opening lines of “Sonnet 30,” the speaker describes “summon[ing] up” to the “sessions of sweet silent thought […] remembrance of things past.” In other words, the speaker is remembering things, bringing memories forward as though they were on trial at a “session,” a court proceeding. The setting for the poem is thus the speaker’s own mind and memories.
The speaker spends most of the poem sifting through these memories, going over all of life’s disappointments and griefs. The speaker obsesses over these setbacks. Indeed, they are so powerful that the speaker can’t let them go—and can’t look beyond them. The speaker feels trapped in memory, unable to see the world outside. The poem never situates the speaker in a place or a broader setting. Even when the speaker remembers the "dear friend"—the love that restores "all losses"—the speaker still doesn't turn outward, doesn't rejoin the world through, for example, descriptive imagery. The poem’s setting is thus the claustrophobic, circumscribed world of the speaker’s mind.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”
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Literary Context
The sonnet originally developed as a form of popular song. During the early Middle Ages, it was sung in Italian taverns. It’s hard to imagine it—now that the word “sonnet” is almost synonymous with elegant, refined love poetry—but the sonnet started its life as a drinking song. However, Italian poets like Petrarch and Dante made the sonnet their own. They wanted to write poems in their own language—not Latin—and so they turned to the sonnet as an appropriate Italian form.
These poets also gave the sonnet its distinctive content and themes. They used the sonnet to write achingly beautiful and passionate love poems for beautiful, inaccessible women. Most of the poets who followed them adopted this gender dynamic. Shakespeare's sonnets are among the only that articulate homoerotic passion, instead of a traditionally heterosexual desire.
From Italy, the sonnet spread across Europe, becoming, for several centuries, one of the most popular poetic forms. The sonnet reached England relatively late in its history. By the time English poets began writing sonnets, in the 1530s and 1540s, Petrarch and Dante’s experiments were several centuries old. But English poets thoroughly embraced the form. Following the publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1590, there was a sonnet craze. For about ten years, English poets—including Edmund Spenser, Thomas Watson, and Shakespeare himself—churned out sonnet sequences.
Although Shakespeare’s Sonnets were not published until 1609, well after the craze had burned out, they were written at the height of the form’s popularity. Perhaps due to their late publication, Shakespeare’s Sonnets were not widely read until they were republished in 1780. Today, Shakespeare’s Sonnets are considered to be his crowning poetic achievement—and sometimes people even read them as a powerful record of his own sexual and emotional life. But they were largely neglected, even forgotten, in his own time.
Historical Context
Shakespeare wrote “Sonnet 30” sometime in the 1590s. (Scholars aren’t exactly sure when.) The 1590s were a time of relative peace and prosperity in England. Queen Elizabeth, the country’s ruler, was at the height of her power; she had recently defeated the Spanish Armada, a huge Spanish fleet. The kingdom was secure from foreign threats, and its internal affairs were firmly under control.
This gave poets the freedom to focus on matters of the heart—and some of the most famous love poems in the English language, by poets like Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and Shakespeare himself, belong to this period. That peace and prosperity wouldn’t last long. After Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the country began a long slide into religious factionalism that ended in a bloody civil war in the 1640s and '50s.
Some scholars have speculated that the sonnets were written in response to a more immediate set of circumstances. In the early 1590s, the theaters were closed during an outbreak of the plague. It's possible that Shakespeare began writing these sonnets on commission from the family of a wealthy aristocrat, the young and spoiled Earl of Southampton—who had refused a wedding orchestrated by his guardian.
Indeed, the early sonnets do urge a beautiful, young aristocratic man to marry and have children. In this account, Shakespeare would’ve begun the sonnets as a way to make up for lost income while the theaters were closed. If that’s true, though, it’s clear that things got out of hand pretty quickly: it doesn’t take long for Shakespeare to give up urging the beautiful young man to get married. Indeed, he seems to have fallen in love with him himself.
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More “Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” Resources
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External Resources
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The 1609 Edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets — A complete facsimile of the first printing of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the 1609 Quarto.
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Shakespeare's Sonnets — A brief essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets by Don Patterson in the Guardian Newspaper.
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A Biography of Shakespeare — The Folger Shakespeare Library provides a detailed overview of Shakespeare's life, with links to more resources.
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Did Shakespeare Want to Suppress His Sonnets? — At NPR, Lynn Neary considers the complicated publication history of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
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"Sonnet 30" Read Aloud — Patrick Stewart recites Shakespeare's "Sonnet 30."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Shakespeare
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