The morning after a declaration of love, most people would expect joy. The speaker of this sonnet is busy waiting for the whole thing to unravel. When "the sun rose on thine oath," she "looked forward to the moon," hoping that the night, with its older associations of change and inconstancy, would "slacken" bonds that seemed "too soon / And quickly tied." The sun and moon give the first lines a quiet drama. Daylight holds the promise, and she is already counting the hours until it weakens. Her reasoning is compressed into a neat saying: "Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe." The words "loving" and "loathe" sit only a few letters apart, which makes the slide from one to the other feel frighteningly easy.
The reason for her doubt is as much about herself as about him. Looking at herself, she sees "not one / For such man's love," and she turns this low opinion into the poem's central image: a "worn viol," out of tune, which "a good singer would be wroth / To spoil his song with." Picked up "in haste," such an instrument is "laid down at the first ill-sounding note." The metaphor is cruel to herself, since she casts herself as damaged goods. It also carries a hidden accusation. The player in her picture is impatient and shallow, someone who grabs whatever is nearest and drops it at the first flaw.
The sonnet's real subject is the moment she sees this. "I did not wrong myself so, but I placed / A wrong on thee." I read this as saying that her self-doubt was not the only mistake. By assuming he would behave like a careless musician, she insulted his judgment and his character. The closing lines turn her own metaphor around. "Perfect strains may float / 'Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced," so a true musician can draw beauty from an instrument others would discard. The last line widens this to people: "great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat." "Stroke" fits both a bow across strings and a single decisive act, and "do and doat" joins action to devotion. Great souls don't need weeks of testing, because they can decide and love in the same moment. The speed she once feared becomes evidence of his strength.
The form supports this change of mind. The octave rhymes *abba abba*, with *oath, troth, loathe, wroth* closing the outer lines. These are heavy words of promise and anger, and they hold her suspicion in place. The inner rhymes, *moon, soon, one, tune*, are slightly less tidy, since "one" only half-matches the others. That slight untidiness suits a speaker who is unsettled. The sestet moves to alternating *cdcdcd*, a looser pattern that lets the argument open out. The viol image also spills across the usual break between octave and sestet. The sentence about the instrument runs through lines 6 to 10 without pausing, so her self-criticism rushes ahead without waiting for the formal turn. The correction arrives in the middle of line 9 ("I did not wrong myself so, but I placed"), as though the thought interrupts itself.
The rhythm is a flexible iambic pentameter that allows natural speech to push against the beat. Dashes and exclamations, as in "such man's love!—more like an out-of-tune," make the voice sound like someone thinking aloud and changing course. The poem moves from the fretful, hurried sound of the early lines to the long, open vowels of "float," "defaced," and "doat" at the end.
The poem's significance lies in its honesty. A love poem could easily stay with the glow of being chosen. This one admits the less flattering fact that being loved can provoke suspicion, and that low self-esteem can quietly turn into an insult to the person offering love. The speaker places herself as the instrument rather than the player, and the sonnet's number suggests it belongs to a longer sequence. Even so, she ends as a self-aware speaker who revises her judgment and says so in public.