Sonnet 84

The Rival Poet

Notes

TLN 1166archaic vocab
“example where your equal grew”
'Example' here is a verb meaning to provide an instance or proof: 'which should example where your equal grew' means 'which should show by example where someone as beautiful as you could be found.' The claim is that no such example exists — the youth is without equal.
TLN 1167archaic vocab
“Lean penury within that pen doth dwell”
'Lean penury' means thin, meager poverty. A poet's pen that can find nothing good to say about his subject is intellectually and morally bankrupt — 'lean' being a physical image (the starved body) applied to the poverty of the verse. The pun on 'pen' (the writing instrument) and 'penury' (poverty) reinforces the idea that bad verse and moral poverty go together.
TLN 1175rhetorical device
“You to your beauteous blessings add a curse, Being fond on praise”
The couplet delivers the volta — the poem's turn of argument — aimed at the youth rather than the rival poet. 'Fond' means foolish or infatuated, carrying a mild rebuke: the youth's appetite for excessive compliment is a kind of folly. Because he craves flattery, every poet who wants to please him inflates the praise, producing worse verse. His love of being praised is the very thing that degrades the quality of his praises.
historical The sonnet form