Shakespeare’s speaker has fallen silent, and he’s trying to figure out why. He wonders aloud if a rival poet’s grand, ambitious style — that “proud full sail of his great verse” — buried his own ideas before they could fully form. Or maybe the man had help from spirits, something supernatural that left the speaker feeling struck dead with intimidation. But he quickly brushes both possibilities aside. No, he insists, neither the rival’s talent nor any ghostly aid actually stunned his writing into silence; he wasn’t afraid of them. The real answer comes in the closing couplet, and it’s far more personal and deflating. Once the beloved’s face became the subject filling that other poet’s lines, the speaker simply ran out of things to say. All his inspiration drained away. The mood is intimate and raw — a mix of defensive pride and the aching, quiet admission that your own voice can wither when someone else gets the attention you crave.
Sonnet 86: Was it the proud full sail of his great verse — Summary
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the prize of all too precious you, That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew? Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write, Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead? No, neither he, nor his compeers by night Giving him aid, my verse astonished. He, nor that affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, As victors of my silence cannot boast; I was not sick of any fear from thence: But when your countenance fill'd up his line, Then lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine.