Sonnet 109

Constancy and the Muse

Notes

TLN 1515archaic vocab
“absence seem'd my flame to qualify”
'Qualify' here means to diminish or weaken in strength, not merely to modify. The speaker preemptively reframes any reading of his absence as evidence that his love has cooled: being away only seemed to reduce the flame; it did not.
TLN 1518archaic vocab
“if I have rang'd, / Like him that travels”
'Rang'd' means wandered or strayed from a fixed point — used of hunting hounds running wide of the pack, or of a person roved from home. The poet openly concedes he has been away and unfocused, but frames it as a traveler's detour, not a permanent departure.
TLN 1520syntax grammar
“Just to the time, not with the time exchang'd”
A compressed, antithetical line: 'just to the time' means punctual, arriving on time; 'not with the time exchang'd' means not altered by the time away — the speaker returns when expected and returns unchanged. 'Exchang'd' means transformed or swapped out for something different.
TLN 1524archaic vocab
“it could so preposterously be stain'd”
'Preposterously' does not simply mean absurdly. Its Latin root is 'praeposterus' — 'with the last before the first' — and it means against natural order, the wrong thing put first. To abandon the beloved's 'sum of good' for nothing would invert all proper valuation, putting worthlessness above worth.