“lease of my true love control”
'Lease' is a contract giving a tenant use of property for a fixed term; when the term ends, the property reverts to the landlord. The poet says that neither his own fears nor the world's prophetic dread could 'control' (govern, put a limit on) his love, even though it was 'supposed as forfeit to a confin'd doom' — assumed to be lost when its short legal term ran out. Love, in other words, was expected to expire like a lease, but it has not.
- TLN 1491historical topical
“sad augurs mock their own presage”
'Augurs' in Rome were priests who predicted the future by reading the flight of birds and the entrails of sacrificed animals. By Shakespeare's day the word had widened to mean any prophet of doom. 'Presage' means a prophecy or forewarning. Here the gloomy predictors who had forecast catastrophe at Elizabeth's death find their own prophecies mocked — proven false — by the peaceable succession. The 'sad' means 'grave, grim' rather than sorrowful.
“Death to me subscribes”
'Subscribes' means yields, concedes, or submits — literally 'writes beneath,' as a defeated party signs below an agreement. Death itself, which normally wins, here acknowledges defeat: because the poet will live on in his verse ('this poor rime'), Death cannot claim him in the usual way. The word belonged to the language of legal instruments and formal submission; to subscribe was to acknowledge another's authority.
historical The sonnet form