Few love poems begin by doubting whether love should be offered at all. This sonnet opens with a question that sounds almost like a legal worry: "Can it be right to give what I can give?" The speaker is loved and pursued, yet she is convinced that her gift is a damaged one, a heart weighed down with sorrow, and that handing it over would wrong the person she cares for. The drama lies in how thoroughly she builds her case for refusal, and in how one short sentence in the final line undoes it.
The first line sets the trap. "Give" appears twice before the line ends and keeps returning: "givers of such gifts as mine are" in line nine, "give thee any love" in line thirteen. Giving should be the language of generosity, but here it becomes a burden. What she has to offer is not joy but tears "as salt as mine" and "the sighing years / Re-sighing on my lips." The hyphenated "re-sighing" is a neat invention. The sigh is not just sounded but sounded again, as though grief had worn a groove in her. The sentence runs over the line endings without pausing, so the sadness piles up with no room to breathe. Even the heavy, Latinate "renunciative" is stretched to rhyme with "give" and "live" only through its last light syllable, which gives the line a slightly strained, over-burdened sound. Her smiles are "infrequent" and "fail to live / For all thy adjurations," meaning his solemn pleadings cannot keep them alive.
The form shows how carefully the speaker is reasoning. The octave follows the traditional Italian pattern, abbaabba, and the sestet runs cdcdcd. The argument spills across the break between the two parts, since the sentence that begins in line eight ("and I own, and grieve") does not finish until line ten. It is as if she cannot stop to take a breath at the point where the form invites her to. The meter is a fairly steady iambic pentameter, which makes the interruptions stand out. "O my fears" and "Out, alas!" jolt the line like small outcries.
The second half turns to imagery of rank and contamination. "We are not peers" means equals, but it also hints at nobility, and judging by what follows, she pictures him in rich, fine things: "purple" and "Venice-glass." She sees herself as "dust" and "poison." Dust soils cloth and poison taints glass, so her love becomes a stain on something precious. The three refusals ("I will not soil... / Nor breathe... / Nor give...") climb like steps, and the last is the biggest: she will give "any love," because to do so "were unjust." Her reasoning has carried her to an extreme. To protect him, she must love him not at all.
Then comes the last line: "Beloved, I only love thee! let it pass." After thirteen lines of tangled argument, the sentence is short, direct, and warm. Calling him "Beloved" is her first openly tender address, and the exclamation mark breaks the controlled tone. "Only" works two ways. It can mean "I do nothing but love you," or it can shrink the confession into something small, "I merely love you," which is not a grand gift at all. "Let it pass" is just as double-edged. It can mean overlook it, let it go by, or let it through. She seems to be asking him to forgive the lapse and to allow the feeling in at once. The rhyme of "pass" with "alas" and "Venice-glass" keeps the sonnet's pattern intact even as her resolve collapses.
The poem matters because it turns a love poem inside out. The sonnet tradition is full of lovers praising someone they can hardly reach, but here the speaker is the one who feels unworthy, and the poem lets us watch her mind change direction. The strict form is a container she tries to keep her feelings inside, and the feeling breaks out anyway. It shows love not as a confident declaration but as something that wins an argument its owner was determined to win against it.