Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
“”But this is precisely backwards. The whole point of the poem (which, I would venture to say, has absolutely nothing to do with cannabis or cocaine) is that he would LOVE to be able to come up with the fashionable ‘new-found methods’ of expressing his love, but he can’t. “Compounds strange’ are compounds of trendy, newfangled LANGUAGE, not compounds cooked up in chemical labs. The ‘noted weed’ line is admittedly somewhat obscure, but near the bottom of the poem he laments that all his best efforts result merely in “dressing old words new”, and since ‘weed’ or weeds meant clothing in his day, his point in the ‘noted weed’ line is surely that his much-to-be-desired ‘invention’ always winds up getting kept buttoned up inside his ‘noted’ (i.e., his familiar and immediately recognizable) style. “”
