Your Notebooks

"Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart / Have faculty by nature to subsist:"

Alessandro Gallenzi’s edition of Shakespeare’s poetry adds a single footnote to Sonnet 122. The note is suspended above the word tables in the first line, and it simply reads “notebooks”.

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full charactered with lasting memory.
Which shall above that idle rank remain
Beyond all date, even to eternity—
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist:
Till each to razed oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be missed.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from was I bold,
To trust those tables that receive thee more:

To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me.

The Ingram and Redpath edition of the sonnets has further notes on the intended meaning of 122. Still, I prefer to stick to my original, mistaken interpretation. My one-sentence paraphrasis is: I will always remember your poems.