Verse > Anthologies > William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. > The Book of Elizabethan Verse
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William Stanley Braithwaite, ed.  The Book of Elizabethan Verse.  1907.
 
Thy Bosom Is Endearèd with All Hearts
By William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
 
THY 1 bosom is endearèd with all hearts
Which I, by lacking, have supposèd dead:
And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought burièd.
How many a holy and obsequious tear        5
Hath dear religious love 2 stol’n from mine eye,
As interest of the dead!—which now appear
But things removed that hidden in thee lie.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, 3        10
Who all their parts of me to thee did give:
—That due of many now is thine alone:
  Their images I loved I view in thee,
  And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.
 
Note 1. Sonnet xxxi. in Shake-speare’s Sonnettes, 1609. Shakespeare’s friend compensates all losses in the past. (Dowden.) [back]
Note 2. Dear religious love: In A Lover’s Complaint, the beautiful youth pleads to his love that all earlier hearts which had paid homage to him now yield themselves through him to her service (a thought similar to that of this sonnet); one of these fair admirers was a nun; a sister sanctified, but (line 250): “Religious love put out Religion’s eyes.” (Dowden.) [back]
Note 3. Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone: Cf. A Lover’s Complaint, line 218:
  Lo, all these trophies of affections hot
*        *        *        *        *
                Must your oblations be.
 
 
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