Sonnet 148: O Me! What Eyes Hath Love Put in My Head
In Sonnet 148, William Shakespeare develops the themes revisited with Sonnet 147 and further elaborates on his realisation that reason has abandoned him and he is therefore incapable of judging properly what he sees. Either that, or his eyes themselves are faulty, since they seem to distort what they are looking at. The conclusion he comes to, much in line with the previous sonnet, is that his defective vision stems from his love for his mistress, but he here adds the almost 'technical' but for this not at all inconsequential detail that his eyes couldn't possibly be expected to deliver a true picture to the brain of what they see, since their vision is blurred by tears, suggesting therefore that this love he feels for his mistress is tinged with sadness, sorrow, or pain.
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29:49
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Sonnet 147: My Love Is as a Fever, Longing Still
In Sonnet 147, William Shakespeare brings together two themes that have agitated him before: firstly the at the time fairly commonplace notion of love – and, more to the point, desire – as a disease that weakens the mind to the point of an irrational madness and afflicts the body in a similarly stark fashion, and secondly the ways in which his mistress deviates from the ordinarily praised ideal of beauty. The sonnet therefore returns the series firmly and identifiably to the 'Dark Lady' and the effect she is having on our poet in an unequivocally physical manner, leaving behind the reflections on the soul of the previous sonnet and concerning itself once more with his lust for someone he knows – or at the very least declares – to be neither traditionally beautiful nor morally sound.
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Sonnet 146: Poor Soul, the Centre of My Sinful Earth
With his solemn, near pious, Sonnet 146, William Shakespeare for the first and only time speaks directly to his soul and entreats it to look after itself; to stop expending its energy on the pursuit of outward, physical adornments which are all doomed to swift decay – effectively starving and weakening itself whilst feeding and strengthening the gluttonous body that is only meant to house it and that will soon succumb to death – and to instead let go of material riches and with the 'return' from 'selling' them, 'purchase' something infinitely more valuable: eternal life in concord with, and on the terms ordained by, God.The poem makes no mention, nor does it allude to or reference indirectly, any lover, mistress, or wife, nor love itself, or sex. This, too, makes it unique in the collection. As does its close alignment with a Christian notion of redemption through spiritual nurture at the expense of, and in preference to, physical or material gratification.
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Sonnet 145: Those Lips That Love's Own Hand Did Make
Sonnet 145 stands out in the collection for several reasons. Some factual, some conjectural, some somewhere in-between. Most obviously and beyond interpretation evident is the fact that it is the only poem composed in iambic tetrameter: it consists of 14 lines of eight syllables each, in contrast to the iambic pentameters present in all the other sonnets, giving each line of those ten or eleven syllables.Also still difficult to dispute, though already in the realm of opinion, is the observation, so as not to say contention, put forward by many scholars and commentators, that the sonnet is poetically, stylistically, literarily 'slight': it strikes a simple tone, uses some extremely familiar imagery and analogy, and is, as far as we can tell, mostly devoid of the high level compositional and rhetorical devices used in many of the other, 'regular', sonnets.Pure supposition, though intelligent and fully valid as a suggestion, is the idea that the sonnet puns on the name Hathaway and is therefore not about the Dark Lady or any other mistress, but about Shakespeare's wife, Anne; and even more adventurous is the conjecture drawn from it that therefore the poem be an early stab of Shakespeare's at as-yet-imperfect sonneteering: there is absolutely no proof that this is so, and it is just as conceivable that Shakespeare with Sonnet 145 deliberately and most intentionally not only employs a different format but also aims for a categorically different tone.
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Sonnet 144: Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair
With his exceptionally explicit and startlingly revelatory Sonnet 144 William Shakespeare addresses head on the fact that his mistress and his lover are certainly friends, and that he suspects – rather strongly, we get the impression – them to be so with benefits.By identifying the man as 'right fair' and contrasting him with a woman who is 'coloured ill', he confirms what we have long thought to be the case: this is a constellation that has turned triangular, and it involves these precise three individuals, the poet, his younger male lover, the Fair Youth of the first 126 sonnets in the collection, and the Dark Lady around whom 25 of the remaining 28 sonnets revolve. This rather puts paid to the suggestion espoused by some scholars that these sonnets can or let alone should be read in isolation, that no narrative of any kind should ever be deduced from them, or that they may have been written to and about any number of lovers of any gender over the period of their composition. What Sonnet 144 shows beyond anything that might still be considered reasonable doubt, and much in line with Sonnets 33 through 42 in the Fair Youth section and Sonnets 133 and 134 in this, the Dark Lady section of the collection, is that these two groups of poems overlap, that they concern themselves with the same 'two loves' of Shakespeare's, and that our poet is profoundly disturbed by the fact that, as he sees and presents it, his mistress has seduced his young man.
About SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived
Sebastian Michael, author of The Sonneteer and several other plays and books, looks at each of William Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets in the originally published sequence, giving detailed explanations and looking out for what the words themselves tell us about the great poet and playwright, about the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady, and about their complex and fascinating relationships.
Podcast transcripts, the sonnets, contact details and full info at https://www.sonnetcast.com
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