Having addressed the loss of love by redefining absence as death, Shakespeare's speaker once again redefines the terms of his argument. This short but closely linked string of poems anticipates not death but abandonment, and the lover finds good reasons for the anticipated farewell as well as good reasons for the beloved to hate him. But his consolatory techniques prove unsatisfactory, and the final two sonnets of this group locate the ultimate consolation for loss of love in the speaker's isolation from reality. He states that he will live in a self-deceiving world of illusion, never acknowledging the lost love.²² These poems reveal the speaker's desperate state and so explain his willingness to accept a consolation that he knows to be based on an illusion.

Sonnets 87-91 prepare for the lover's decision to live in a state of self-deception. The speaker relies on typical argumentative strategies, finding a way to unite himself with his beloved and using one loss to console for another—strategies that meet with almost immediate failure. For example, in the conclusion of sonnet 90 the speaker invites abandonment as a cure for other sorrows:

But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might,
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.

Sonnet 91, in which the speaker admits the cost of losing his beloved, implies the ineffectual nature of such consolations. After listing pleasures others have, the lover claims, "And having thee, of all men's pride I boast; / Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take / All this away, and me most wretched make."

In order to insulate himself against this complete misery, the lover resorts in the next two poems to a strategy of redefinition. The argumentative terms of sonnet 92 prevent, by definition, loss of the beloved during the speaker's life. This strategy for creating a consolation does not depend upon the immortalizing powers of poetry, or upon the Neoplatonically conceived love between the two men, or upon any possible form of union that the speaker might imagine. Instead, the speaker consoles himself by means of an argument that equates the loss of love with the loss of his life. Given this definition, he can argue that he will not lose his beloved during his lifetime:

But do thy worst to steal thyself away,
For term of life thou art assured mine,
And life no longer than thy love will stay,
For it depends upon that love of thine.
Then need I not to fear the worst of wrongs,
When in the least of them my life hath end.
Thou canst not vex me with inconstant mind,
Since that my life on thy revolt doth lie.
O what a happy title do I find,
Happy to have thy love, happy to die!
But what's so blessed-fair that fears no blot?
Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not.

Shakespeare's speaker defines life as the time during which he possesses the youth's love. Thus he creates for himself a state of rest and stability, free from the vexations of the youth's inconstancy and from the fear of literal death. But the couplet points out the flaw in this scheme: the lover may not know of the youth's falsity in love. As the next sonnet points out, however, consolation lies in the possibility that objective truth can be ignored. The lover can choose to hide in the "reality" of his subjective world. Willful self-deception provides the speaker with his consolatory defense against the wretched state of being abandoned by the young man.

In the final sonnet of this group (93), the speaker manipulates the assumed connection between outer beauty and inner virtue to explain how he will necessarily remain, "Like a deceived husband," ignorant of his beloved's falsity:

. . . heav'n in thy creation did decree,
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell,
Whate'er thy thought or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show.

The speaker argues that his beloved's outer appearance does not provide the expected evidence of his inner state. The young man may hate him, but that hatred will go unrecognized. Furthermore, the lover is willing to be misled into thinking his beloved to be virtuous. The speaker's ultimate consolation in the face of a reality that he cannot control is to ignore it. But the couplet, with its mention of "Eve's apple," betrays the speaker's awareness that this consolation depends upon succumbing to the temptation of being willingly deceived.