Volta project, three weeks down :)

Watched Rush with my daughter yesterday.  Because my daughter’s getting her driving license next summer  J  Sonnet 21:

________________________________________

XXI

  So is it not with me as with that Muse,

  Stirr'd by a painted beauty to his verse,

  Who heaven itself for ornament doth use

  And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,

  Making a couplement of proud compare

  With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,

  With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare,

  That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.

  O! let me, true in love, but truly write,

  And then believe me, my love is as fair

  As any mother's child, though not so bright

  As those gold candles fix'd in heaven's air:

    Let them say more that like of hearsay well;

    I will not praise that purpose not to sell.

_________________________________________

I’m calling the second not in the last line—the antepenultimate word of the sonnet!—the volta here.  That would be a *very* late “parachute” (Jim’s term) … 

The first twelve lines describe a riddle:  Another “Muse” is extravagant with (false) praise (quatrains one and two), the lyric I of this sonnet is not (quatrain three);

the riddle is repeated (in summary) in the next one and a half lines (line 13 summarizes the position of the other “Muse”, and the first four words of line 14 summarize the position of the lyric I) (so the two positions are summarized in the same order in which they were presented in the three quatrains, and their summaries are allotted the same proportions of text that they received in the three quatrains, the other “Muse” getting twice as much room as the lyric I);

and then the riddle is solved in the last three words:  It’s all because the lyric I doesn’t “purpose … to sell.”