Sonnet 90

Estrangement and Return

Notes

TLN 1248archaic vocab
“the world is bent my deeds to cross”
'Bent' means determined or inclined; 'cross' means to obstruct or thwart. The line means: 'while the world is resolved to work against everything I do.' The poet casts his current troubles as a general conspiracy of circumstances, not any single person.
TLN 1250archaic vocab
“drop in for an after-loss”
'Drop in' means to arrive casually or belatedly, as an uninvited addition. An 'after-loss' is a supplementary blow that falls after the main damage is done. The plea is: do not tack on your desertion as a final blow once the speaker has already suffered everything else.
TLN 1253rhetorical device
“Give not a windy night a rainy morrow”
This is the sonnet's central image: a stormy night is hard to endure, but waking to a rainy day afterward is what breaks the spirit by prolonging misery. The poet uses a proverbial weather contrast to argue that cumulative grief — one blow following another — is worse than a single decisive catastrophe.
TLN 1259archaic vocab
“other strains of woe, which now seem woe”
'Strains' here means kinds or varieties, not efforts or physical pulls. The couplet argues: every other kind of suffering that currently feels painful will lose its force by comparison once the loss of the youth is factored in. The youth is the absolute measure of the speaker's grief-scale.