The beloved, like the sun at dawn, was radiant and promised splendor, but clouds quickly obscured him, and now he is hidden from the speaker's sight.
Lines 1–8 establish the sun's natural cycle: beautiful at dawn, then unavoidably obscured by clouds. It is a pattern, not a betrayal. But when applied to the beloved in line 9, this natural cycle becomes deeply personal. 'But out alack, he was but one hour mine'—the word 'but' (only) transforms the sun's normal movement into a wound. The radiance was real (lines 9–10 confirm its splendor) but devastatingly brief. The speaker's anguish is not that the beloved is flawed but that the perfection, once glimpsed, was instantly snatched away. This is the cruelty of false dawns: they promise daylight, then deliver darkness.
The final couplet offers a form of forgiveness that is not quite forgiveness: 'Yet him for this, my love no whit disdaineth.' The speaker claims he doesn't scorn the beloved, then universalizes the failure: even the perfect sun can be darkened, so why blame a merely mortal beloved? This is mature acceptance, but it's also a kind of numbness. The speaker talks himself into not blaming—'Suns of the world may stain'—which is philosophically sound but emotionally evasive. He has not resolved his pain but intellectualized it, rendering it unexceptional. The forgiveness is preemptive, protecting the beloved from the speaker's real accusation.
Someone you love seemed perfect at first—bright, radiant, shining on you. But then something shifted. Clouds came, and now you can't see them the same way. You don't know if it's temporary weather or if they're gone permanently. You're left confused, hurt, and trying to convince yourself it doesn't matter, even though it does.