Sonnet 119: What Potions Have I Drunk of Siren Tears
What potions have I drunk of siren tears,
Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within, Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears, Still losing when I saw myself to win. What wretched errors hath my heart committed Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never; How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted In the distraction of this madding fever. O benefit of ill, now I find true That better is by evil still made better, And ruined love when it is built anew Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater. So I return rebuked to my content And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent. |
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What potions have I drunk of siren tears,
Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within, |
The sonnet connects to the closing line of the previous one, which spoke of drugs that turn out to be poisonous, and now elaborates on the nature of these potions that Shakespeare suggests he has metaphorically taken by spending his time with other lovers: they were made of 'siren tears' which themselves had been distilled from alembics that contain a substance or liquid that is as repulsive as hell, whereby 'foul' at the time also has a strong moral connotation, as in 'murder most foul'.
If ever a metaphor came along mixed, this is surely it. Shakespeare either wittingly or – we can't rule this out as a possibility – haphazardly piles on top of each other multiple images and with them possible avenues for interpretation, starting with the potions, which clearly relate back to the drugs and 'eager compounds' of Sonnet 118, and which are here given an even more resolutely chemist connotation by being "distilled from limbecks foul as hell within." 'Limbeck' is a variant term for 'alembic', which in turn goes back to the Arabic al-anbīq, meaning 'the still', hence 'the lembic', which without the article then transmutes into 'limbeck'. A still, in case your knowledge of chemical apparatus is a little hazy, is a 'gourd shape container' (Oxford Languages) used to heat up liquids and funnel their steam into a cooling vessel, thus literally dis-stilling from it. The fact that the liquid from which these 'siren tears' are distilled are 'foul as hell' tells us a lot about Shakespeare's current feeling towards the kind of encounters he is alluding to, but fascinating in itself is the expression 'siren tears'. It is not – as one might get the impression – proverbial or common, even at the time. Fake or false tears then as now are usually associated with crocodiles, whereas the Sirens are mythical creatures who first appear in Homer's Odyssey. They tempt passing sailors to their island with their 'siren song' there to devour them and pile up their bones in a heap of rotting carcasses. Odysseus heeds the warning he receives from the goddess Circe and plugs his sailors' ears with wax while having himself tied hand and foot upright to the mast of the ship so he can listen to the Sirens without being able to do anything stupid, such as jumping off ship and swimming to their island, as he would be unable to resist doing. Whilst Homer provided no physical description of the Sirens but had them dwell on a meadow on their island, another Greek poet, Apollonius of Rhodes, five hundred years later, in the 3rd century BCE, gives them the appearance of half woman half bird, which is why over the centuries and by the time Shakespeare gets to use the term 'Syren', they often become conflated with mermaids, who are half woman half fish. Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition of The Sonnets points out that Shakespeare's contemporary John Dickenson in his short narrative Greene in Conceipt, published in 1598, closely associates siren song with crocodile tears, and although we don't know whether Shakespeare had read this work, it suggests that the two were at the time 'common currency' and might easily be conflated. The relevant passage in Dickenson speaks of the personified vices of Gluttony and Lechery and how they ensnare their victim: They hauing Sirens tongues and Crocodiles teares, thereby entic'd him to in∣tangle him, and preuailed: for as the Hemlocke of Attica tempered with wine, is of all compounded poysons the most deadly: so of all enticements that is most dangerous, where wit and beautie lodg'd both in one subiect, are so employed. (p. 48) Noteworthy about this is that it not only places siren tongues and crocodile tears right next to each other and in the possession of gluttony and lechery, but that it also mentions 'compounded poisons', which further hints at Shakespeare possibly having been consciously or subconsciously influenced by it. The long and the short of it all being that these potions carried the essence of being false, deceptive, and seductive, yes, but also destructive. |
Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win. |
And in doing so, I was applying – as one would apply an ointment or healing agent to a wound or a sore – my fears to my hopes and equally my hopes to my fears, effectively trying to cure one with the other, but never succeeding. Instead, when all the while I thought I was winning, I was in fact losing all the time.
This is a tremendously compact and insightful couple of lines: it sums up in 17 words and twenty syllables what it feels like to be chasing a fantasy. Here the fantasy is of love elsewhere, but the same could be said of virtually any pursuit of the unattainable: you invest your hopes to overcome your fears only to then find your fears to have been fully justified and therefore now newly crushing your hopes, whence the cycle starts over, and each time you think you're winning, surely, at last, you are still forever losing, because it is, after all, but a fantasy that you are in ever vain pursuit of. 'Still' here as so often means 'always'. Katherine Duncan-Jones, incidentally, and since we mentioned her a moment ago, thinks Shakespeare is here speaking of his metaphorical 'illness' that he saw himself to win against or conquer. That, though possible, doesn't strike me as compelling though and the next line, which invokes errors of the heart appears to strongly support a reading here of winning 'in love'. |
What wretched errors hath my heart committed
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never; |
What terrible mistakes has my heart made at these times and in these moments and on these occasions, when it thought of itself as more blessed – luckier, more fortunate, more privileged – than it had ever been before.
This – as so very much in Shakespeare – loses somewhat in translation, because making a mistake is one thing, but 'committing an error' is really quite another. It evokes much more the act of committing a sin or a crime, and it further strongly suggests what in the context of a marriage would be adulterous acts. And with Shakespeare's and the young man's, as Sonnet 116 told us, being a 'marriage of true minds', an equivalence would therefore appear to be directly implied. PRONUNCIATION: Note that blessed here has two syllables: bles-sèd. |
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted
In the distraction of this madding fever. |
How my eyes have popped during and because of the distraction caused by this fever or illness that drove me crazy, for which read my attraction to these other people.
'Fitted' here has the meaning of eyes being forced out of their sockets by fits or paroxysms of madness, the madness again being the love or lust of which the poet was at the time possessed, and this invokes both the image of a raving lunatic whose eyes are popping out of their skull in an insane rage, and also that of a person who is utterly smitten and whose eyes pop because of what they see, madness and love then as now, and particularly in Shakespeare, being closely and often humorously, but with appreciable grains of truth, associated. 'Spheres', meanwhile, here clearly refers to the eyes' sockets, but Shakespeare also compares eyes to stars, for example in Sonnet 14: Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck | ...| But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive, | And constant stars, in them I read such art... and here he almost certainly is also referencing the celestial spheres: the orbits on which, according to ancient astronomy, all objects in the sky circle around the earth. |
O benefit of ill, now I find true
That better is by evil still made better, |
O there is a benefit or an upside or a positive aspect to ill, meaning not only my metaphorical 'sickness' of having been attracted to these other people and 'committed errors' with them, but also that which is generally bad or indeed, as the next line suggests, evil. And now I find it to be true that that which is good, as in morally sound and virtuous, is by the trials and tribulations of evil, for which here in turn read also quite generally that which is challenging and problematic, made even better, perhaps a bit as we colloquially today might say: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Although the 'better' which is by evil made even better may refer not only to Shakespeare himself, who thus would be describing himself as essentially a good person, but also to his younger lover who through these 'evils' experienced by Shakespeare turns out to be even more worthy of his love, or indeed the love itself, as the following couple of lines also imply. The way this realisation is formulated suggests that this is a generally recognised truth which Shakespeare here is latching on to. |
And ruined love when it is built anew
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater. |
And love which has been ruined or wrecked or damaged, when it is newly restored turns out to be even more beautiful, stronger and far greater than it had been before this calamity fell upon it.
Taken directly from the world of physical buildings and construction, this is borne out to this day. As a recent example we may point to the magnificent restoration of Notre Dame de Paris, or, a little further back and less well known, the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, which was entirely destroyed by a fire on New Year's Eve 1921/22 and then rebuilt between 1924 and 1928 as a much larger, uniquely shaped and at the time revolutionary cast concrete structure that stands firm and strong to this date |
So I return rebuked to my content
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent. |
And so I return to my state of contentment and overall wellbeing rebuked or chastised but strengthened and find that I have therefore actually gained three times more by my errors, my mistakes, the bad things that I have done and that have as a result also happened to me, than I have spent, for which read than it has cost me in emotional upset and damage.
With its echo of Sonnet 109, 'my content' may also have a layered meaning of that which gives me contentment, that which is what I really need and want, which is you: That is my home of love, if I have ranged, Like him that travels I return again, because of course the 'ills' here referred to are still, as in Sonnets 109, and 110, and most directly and similarly using the 'sickness' metaphor in Sonnet 118, my philandering ways, my infidelities, my sexual escapades with other people. |
[NOTES TO FOLLOW]