The poet begs the Dark Lady to accept him as 'Will' and allow his name to suffice as his identity, reducing himself to his name alone.
Name and verb collapse: Will (the poet) will (act to) fulfill. Identity and action merge syntactically.
Paradoxically freeing: to be nothing is to be unaccountable, invisible, free from judgment.
The sonnet opens with a plea to swear before her 'blind soul' that the poet was her Will. Blindness is key: her soul cannot see, cannot judge. The poet asks to be accepted on faith, not evidence. This aligns with the Dark Lady sequence's meditation on love as willed self-deception. The poem acknowledges that his plea is false ('Swear to thy blind soul that I was') but asks her to accept the fiction anyway. Love, in this formulation, is collaborative illusion.
Line 7's 'things of great receipt' suggests containers that hold vast quantities without overflow. The Dark Lady is a capacious vessel; the poet wants to be liquid poured into her. But paradoxically, line 9 argues that being one among thousands means being nothing at all—invisible, uncounted. This freedom through anonymity might be the poem's only comfort: if he doesn't matter, he's also free from the burden of mattering.
Like a crush asking you to forget everything about them except their name and role in your life. 'Just call me by my name and think of me as yours.' It's the reduction of personhood to a function in someone else's narrative.