Sonnet 91

Estrangement and Return

1 Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
2 Some in their wealth, some in their body's force,
3 Some in their garments though new-fangled ill;
4 Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
5 And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
6 Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
7 But these particulars are not my measure,
8 All these I better in one general best.
9 Thy love is better than high birth to me,
10 Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' costs,
11 Of more delight than hawks and horses be;
12 And having thee, of all men's pride I boast:
13 Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
14 All this away, and me most wretchcd make.

Notes

TLN 1261rhetorical device
“Some glory in their birth, some in their skill, / Some in their wealth”
The opening eight lines build a catalog (the rhetorical device of enumeratio) — listing seven things men pride themselves on: birth, skill, wealth, physical strength, fashionable clothes, hawks, and horses. This anaphoric repetition of 'Some in their...' creates a drumbeat that the poet then dismisses all at once. Puttenham calls such accumulation 'congeries' or 'heaping'; its purpose here is to make the dismissal in the sestet feel total.
historical The sonnet form
TLN 1263archaic vocab
“garments though new-fangled ill”
'New-fangled' means excessively fond of novelty; something 'new-fangled ill' is fashionable in a tasteless or foolish way. The word carries a mild sneer — novelty-chasing as a character flaw, not mere preference. OED records the adjective as derogatory from at least the sixteenth century.
TLN 1265archaic vocab
“every humour hath his adjunct pleasure”
'Humour' here means a person's dominant temperament or inclination — whatever they happen to be drawn to. Elizabethan medicine taught that four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, choler, black bile) governed personality; by extension 'humour' came to mean any governing mood or taste. 'Adjunct' means something attached as a companion or accessory to it.
TLN 1267wordplay
“these particulars are not my measure, / All these I better in one general best”
'Measure' means standard of value or criterion — not 'amount.' The poet is saying that no single particular pleasure (birth, wealth, hawks, horses) is the right yardstick for him. 'Better' is a verb: he surpasses all those particluar goods in one thing that is the best of everything combined.