Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University ofToronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer interprets "Sonnet 29" as a rhetorical demonstration of "how one reasons one's way around circumstance "

In the narrative of Shakespeare's sonnets, "Sonnet 29" falls among the phase (sonnets 1-129) where the voice of the older poet, the voice of experience and good counsel, fights off challenges for a young man's affections from another poet and from a dark lady. In this schema, "Sonnet 29" falls at a low, melancholy point in the apparent narrative. It is a complaint, in the true Renaissance style, where the persona dwells on a sense of loss—in this context, the possible loss of favor in the eyes of the young man. The poem begins with the famous line, "When...