The speaker, ashamed of his own unworthiness, begs the beloved to forget him and bury his name rather than risk their reputation by praising him after his death.
Sonnet 72 performs a dark reversal. The speaker's shame doesn't remain private—it becomes the beloved's problem. By continuing to love someone he judges worthless, the beloved also becomes tainted. The final couplet ('And so should you, to love things nothing worth') is both self-abasing and accusatory: loving the speaker shames the beloved. This inverts the emotional dynamic; the speaker punishes the beloved for loyalty. Shame becomes a gift the speaker bestows, making their mutual love a mutual degradation rather than elevation.
The sonnet constructs a logical trap. The world will demand explanation of the beloved's love. If they tell the truth ('there's nothing worthy in him'), the beloved sounds like a fool. If they lie, their 'true love' seems false. If they say nothing, they've accepted the shame premise. No discourse option redeems the beloved. This reflects the broader dynamic: the beloved cannot love the speaker and maintain social honor simultaneously. The sonnet stages a relationship that is fundamentally incompatible with public existence, a love that requires silence, forgetting, and erasure to preserve both parties.
A person says to their partner: 'If people ask what you see in me, don't answer honestly. The truth is shameful.' This creates an impossible bind—loving someone while despising yourself, requiring the beloved to either lie or stay silent. The relationship becomes built on mutual silence and the unspoken admission that the speaker is beneath love.