The second burthen of a former child!

toxicsemicolon:

I’ve seen people picking up on the Sonnet 59 in general as the “nothing new under the sun”/”ACD wrote canon Johnlock himself b*nches” sonnet, but the drawing of attention to Sonnet 59 specifically in the scene when Mary is going into labor highlights a few lines in particular:

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child!

Or as described in analysis:

an extended metaphor describing the poet’s brain as a mother’s womb, labouring to bring forth original verse only to mistakenly write something (“second burden”) that has already been written (“former child”), as if the mother had suffered two bouts of labour to give birth to the same child twice.

The Six Thatchers was a case that Sherlock and John already solved together, and John published on the blog, and yet it is repeated/modified in T6T. Given the overlay of Sonnet 59 specifically in the birth scene, it seems highly likely that this repetition of this specific case is intentional. It also gives serious weight to the theory that the majority/entirety of T6T is a fabrication/embellishment of the truth as narrated by Sherlock himself, possibly as an alibi for John’s shooting of Mary. Sherlock, labouring to bring forth an original story to flesh out his whopper, falls back on the skeleton of a case that he’s already solved and that John has already written.

And just for fun, you know what’s a lovely English idiom that means “an incredible or far-fetched story”? A fish story.

Right. Also interesting in this light is the repeated assertion that “it’s never twins.” Rather than two babies, it is “as if the mother had suffered two bouts of labour to give birth to the same child twice.” Implications abound.

The final question is to do with the next two episodes: will we see a second burthen of the case in TAB, with Mary faking her death only to return to kill her husband? Will the entirety of T6T be born again, beginning with a second visit to the baby’s actual birth and retelling the truth of story we’ve just seen?