Nor faint, though crosses with my fortune kiss
Double entendre is commonplace in Renaissance poetry, and this sonnet is no exception. Here, Wroth plays on the word “crosses,” using it to refer both to the maze’s physical crosses, or intersections, and metaphorically, in reference to the burdens the speaker carries. The many choices offered by the maze thus perfectly embody the difficulty of navigating a troubled relationship. The speaker complains that these crosses “kiss” with her fortune, or are intimate with her future in a way she herself is not. The speaker feels tempted to faint, or give up, because her burdens have more of a say over what happens to her than she herself does. By describing the crosses as kissing with her fortune, she personifies both her troubles and the maze, suggesting that these are sentient entities who can actively and maliciously interfere with her life.
I must these doubts endure without allay
Or help, but travail find for my best hire.
This quote can be pretty confusing, especially if you’re not familiar with the differences between Renaissance and contemporary English. The word "allay" here means something like “relief”—she must endure her doubts as she wanders the maze, without the comfort of a sense of direction or a clear rationale for her decisions. The words “travail” and “hire” in the next line are more ambiguous; these words aren’t really used in modern English, and they had multiple meanings when Wroth was writing. Part of the challenge—and the fun—of reading old poetry is the fact that these divergent definitions for vocabulary words mean that the author’s intentions aren’t always clear. One convincing reading of this line translates travail as “laborious effort” and hire as “employee.” The line can then be read as “the best employee I can get to help out is my own laborious efforts.”
Yet that which most my troubled sense doth move,
Is to leave all, and take the thread of love.
In the final couplet, the speaker broadens her view. The first three stanzas are all trapped within the maze, as the speaker tries to figure out first which path to take, and then how to motivate herself to move through the maze at all. Then, at the end of the poem, she suddenly looks beyond the maze, and suggests the possibility of being somewhere else entirely. The word “sense” carries more weight here than might be immediately obvious. As Ellie Stedall argues in an article for the Oxford English Dictionary, the development of the word “sense” “was driven as much by the pressing matter of interpreting language…as by the discourse surrounding the faculties of the mind, brain, and body.” In other words, “sense” had to do both with interpreting the meaning of language, and with the use of sight, smell, etc. to interpret the physical world.
With “troubled sense,” the speaker suggests a few different realities. The maze troubles sense because it deprives the speaker of the visual and other sensory clues that we normally rely on to navigate the world. However, she also implies that her capacity to find meaning in the world is also troubled by the maze. While trapped within romantic love, she has struggled to find the deeper meanings of the things that surround her. Stedall stresses that interpreting language felt so crucial to early modern people because the Bible demanded interpretation. The speaker’s difficulty with sense might have a religious edge—she’s struggling to use the part of her reasoning that might help her get closer to God.
