The speaker, anticipating his death, begs his beloved not to mourn him lest public scrutiny damage the beloved's reputation.
Sonnet 71 weaponizes erasure as devotion. The speaker's insistence that the beloved forget him is not selflessness but a complex negotiation: by asking to be forgotten, he positions himself as the one protecting the beloved. He trades his own presence for the beloved's reputation. This is emotionally manipulative—the very act of writing and publishing these lines ensures he cannot truly be forgotten. The sonnet becomes a guarantee of remembrance disguised as a plea for oblivion, turning absence into immortality.
The sonnet's urgency derives from Elizabethan social anxieties. To be mourned by a beloved for a 'vile' or unworthy person was to invite gossip and public contempt. The speaker acknowledges his own baseness—he's not worth the beloved's grief. Yet by articulating this fear so vividly, he paradoxically insists on his significance: only someone who matters enough to wound the beloved's reputation merits this elaborate strategy of self-abnegation. The poem's dramatic extremity reveals the speaker's desperate need to be consequential.
Imagine a partner leaving explicit instructions in their will: 'Don't talk about me after I'm gone.' It reads as self-sacrifice but conceals deep insecurity—worry that being associated with them might hurt the other person socially or professionally. The speaker is simultaneously erasing himself and making his erasure the centerpiece of his love.