Sonnet 112
Your love and pity doth the impression fill
approval
reputation
love
isolation
Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow?
You are my all the world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue:
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steel'd sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others' voices, that my adder's sense
To critic and to flatterer stopped are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides methinks are dead.
What It Means
The young man's love fills in the scar that 'vulgar scandal' has stamped on Shakespeare's brow. As long as he has the young man's approval, no one else's opinion matters. The world's voices are muffled by that single affirmation. He has so tuned himself to the young man that he literally can't hear other people — they are like the dead to him.
Context
Part of the Fair Youth sequence.
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