Sonnet 30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
grief
memory
loss
friendship
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:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
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.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
What It Means
Shakespeare sits in silence and reviews his past losses. Friends who have died. Ambitions that failed. Old griefs he thought were resolved but aren't. He accounts for all of it, grief by grief. Then the turn: just thinking of the young man 'restores' everything. All the losses are paid. The legal metaphor is carefully sustained — 'sessions,' 'summon,' 'cancell'd,' 'account' — as if he's going through a ledger of sorrow and finding it wiped clean.
Context
Part of the Fair Youth sequence. The legal and financial language throughout gives it unusual precision for a poem about grief.
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