Sonnet 30 The lines "from woe to woe tell over" suggest a kind of metaphor in which Shakespeare's woes and failings are like an account book that he reads through over and over. The word "heavily" before these lines also suggests that Shakespeare's reads this "account book" in a painful manner. Finally, the fact that words “fore-bemoaned moan” that come close on the heels of the words "grievances foregone" before it also suggest that Shakespeare is continuously reviewing his past sorrows . The couplet of the sonnet consists of lines 13 and 14, and they seem to be used to clinch the
Sonnet 151 steer his actions. It uses the body as a metaphor for the penis, "rising" and "falling" with an erection when aroused, and so reduces the speaker to nothing more than his phallus; by giving in to his desires he enslaves himself to the "Dark Lady". Sonnet 151, with a "bawdy chronicle of erection and detumescence," contrasts with Sonnet 55's "grandiloquent expression," but their theme is the same: "what changes, what remains." Sonnet 55 "celebrates ... love and poetry that endure[s]" where Sonnet 151 "contemplates the inevitability of change..." Sonnet 151 has been compared to a verse by 17th-century author Joseph