First Quatrain: “Is it thy will, thy image should keep open”
In Shakespeare sonnet 61, the speaker begins with his first question: “Is it thy will, thy image should keep open / My heavy eyelids to the weary night?” Addressing his muse, he asks a yes/no question, trying to ascertain if it is the muse’s desire that even though he is exhausted, he should lie awake envisioning her, instead of drifting off to much-deserved sleep.
He refuses to take all the fatigue on himself, assigning it to the “weary night.” His own mental awareness leaches out into the environment as he strives to brush the muse-image from his brain. He examines his melancholy to determine the cause, while he explores the imagery that might be sustaining his ambiguity.
He then poses his second question: “Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken, / While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?” This question bears a resemblance to the first, except that the second question contains a more sinister estimation of the muse; instead of merely an image, it becomes a myriad of “shadows,” and instead of being merely being kept awake by the shadows, they “mock [his] sight.”
Second Quatrain: “Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee”
The third question is scathing in its implications. He asks his muse, whom he accuses of being “far from home” when he knows intellectually that she is ever within his own true self, if she telescopes her spirit to spy on his “shames and idle hours.”
The question indicates that he feels guilty about his own lackadaisical attitude toward his work, but it is easy and face-saving to blame his own laziness on the muse’s absence. In this wise, he is saying to the muse, “if you would not flee so far from me, I would always be equipped to create; it is, therefore, the burden of your absence caused by your jealousy that makes me falter.”
Third Quatrain: “O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great”
The speaker then answers his own questions, recognizing that the liability is his alone. He cannot allow himself to be motivated by a muse that he can ostracize at will. He can receive only so much inspiration from the muse, because “[the muse’s] love, though much, is not so great” as his own.
He acknowledges that he is the only one who is answerable for his own inspiration: “It is my love that keeps mine eye awake.” He says, “Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat”: He accepts his own culpability in his apathetic behavior
The Couplet: “For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere”
In the couplet, the speaker again divulges that he has become too reliant on a false image of the muse, as if she were able to “wake elsewhere” and “with others all too near.” By stating baldly his own absurd image, he has given it an airing that will allow him to release his excuses and embrace his accountability.
Other Shakespeare articles: Who is Shakespeare?
Sonnet Commentaries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 73, 96, 116, 126, 130, 138
