Shakespeare’s speaker lays out a raw, exhausted complaint against everything wrong in the world. He’s so sick of seeing goodness degraded — honest poverty ignored while empty showiness gets celebrated, pure faith broken, real honor tossed aside, and virtue turned into something cheap. Every line piles on another injustice: art is silenced by those in power, foolishness passes for expertise, simple truth gets mocked as simple-mindedness, and good itself is held captive by cruelty. The tone is bitter and bone-tired, a voice that has simply had enough. He says he longs for death to escape it all, and you believe him — until the final couplet twists sharply. He would gladly leave this corrupt world, except that dying would mean abandoning the person he loves. That one soft, stubborn attachment is the only thing keeping him here, and it shifts the whole storm of anger into something unexpectedly tender.
Sonnet 66: Tired with all these, for restful death I cry — Summary
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd, And strength by limping sway disabled And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly--doctor-like--controlling skill, And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill: Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.