Paraphrase
Don't feel sorry for what you did; everything in nature is flawed or subject to imperfection. All people commit errors; I am making an error in this (i.e., this effort to make you feel better). I'm using these natural comparisons to exonerate you, and thus corrupting myself by forgiving you. (Lines 7 and 8 are obscure and contested.) To forgive your sensual fault, I use my sense (presumably common sense or reason); though you have wronged me I am defending you, and as a result, I am forced to argue against my own interests. Indeed, my feelings of love and hate are so confused that I have become an accomplice to you, the very person who is sinning against me.
Read more about this topic: Sonnet 35
Famous quotes containing the word paraphrase:
“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)