This sonnet gives voice to a lover so deeply merged with the beloved that solitude becomes impossible. The speaker admits that even when alone, he is never truly solitary, because the other person lives inside him. He describes a strange self-alienation: since the beloved entered his life, he has been “transported” out of himself and into the other’s being. Distance doesn’t weaken this bond—they remain vividly present to each other—and their rare meetings are so overwhelming that they feel senseless, almost absent, in each other’s company.
The mood is one of dizzy entrapment. The speaker half-pleads, half-commands the beloved to take back their own self and return his, yet he immediately realizes the hopelessness: too much of him now resides in the beloved, so any retrieval would only drag the beloved closer. The closing cry lays bare the torment of a love that feels like bewitchment—he longs to flee from his own self (now inextricably the beloved’s) or from the beloved’s self, but both are the same prison. The poem crackles with frustrated desire, intellectual playfulness, and the ache of having no clear boundary between two souls.