Sonnet 141: In Faith, I Do Not Love Thee With Mine Eyes
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In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note; But tis my heart that loves what they despise, Who in despite of view is pleased to dote. Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted, Nor tender feeling to base touches prone, Nor taste, nor smell desire to be invited To any sensual feast with thee alone. But my five wits nor my five senses can Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee, Who leaves unswayed the likeness of a man, Thy proud heart's slave and vassal wretch to be: Only my plague thus far I count my gain, That she that makes me sin awards me pain. |
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In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note; |
In truth, or if truth be told, I don't love you with my eyes, because they, my eyes, see in you a thousand faults or flaws.
The most immediate and direct meaning of this opening gambit is of course: I don't love you on account of your looks, because you are just not that beautiful. In the context of the poems leading up to this, starting with Sonnets 133 and 134, which lament the fact that the mistress has apparently seduced Shakespeare's young lover, and then throughout Sonnets 135 to 140, which all characterise the mistress as highly promiscuous, 'errors' can and most likely should be read here also with a moral connotation: I see the many men you have sex with and so I cannot love you 'in faith', as in truthfully or faithfully, because clearly neither you nor I are faithful to each other. |
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But tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote. |
But rather it is my heart which loves that which my eyes despise – you – because it, my heart, is happy to dote on you in spite of what the eyes see when they look at you.
As every so often, Shakespeare here semi-personalises the heart by referring to it as 'who', rather than 'which', as we would do today. 'To dote', then as now, implies an uncritical love that is possibly excessive and unreasonable, even foolish. In Sonnet 131, Shakespeare told his mistress: For well thou knowst, to my dear doting heart Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel. Yet in good faith some say that thee behold, Thy face hath not the power to make love groan, similarly pitching his heart's fondness for her against her underwhelming charms. |
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Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted,
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Nor are my ears delighted with the sound of your voice.
The 'tongue's tune' may here be understood to be the woman's voice generally, rather than specifically or only her singing voice, although a slightly sarcastic allusion is almost certainly intended to the poetic notion that ordinarily in love poems, a mistress's voice is like sweet music to her lover's ears. Again, our poet made a similar, though in that instance somewhat friendlier observation in Sonnet 130: I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; whereby there his principal point was one of lampooning other poets' hyperbole, as we noted at the time. |
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Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,
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Nor am I drawn to, or do I especially enjoy, close physical contact with you.
Shakespeare's 'tender feeling' is generally interpreted as him referring to his delicate sense of touch, but there is obviously a word play at work here also on his tender, as in loving, feelings towards his mistress, which nonetheless do not incline towards her touches. The fact that these touches themselves are 'base' makes them by definition sexual, unrefined. In Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene 2, the Duke admonishes Pompey for the women whom he pimps out to other men: Say to thyself, From their abominable and beastly touches I drink, I eat, array myself, and live. Thus the line in this sonnet directly contradicts the wish expressed elsewhere for the mistress's touch. Sonnet 128 made much of the poet's desire to be in the place of the instrument's keys as they are being stroked by the mistress when she plays the virginals. This might invite a suggestion that perhaps Shakespeare is talking about two different mistresses here, but it is in fact far more likely a simple function of his obvious and elsewhere also repeatedly evidenced conflicted feelings towards her and his physical relationship with her, which throughout these sonnets oscillates from intense lust to abject disgust. |
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Nor taste, nor smell desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone. |
Nor does either my sense of taste or of smell wish to be invited to any 'feast of the senses' with you.
The Banquet of the Senses as a sensual feast for one to indulge in the consuming pleasure of another was a well established concept in poetry at the time. George Chapman, a direct contemporary of Shakespeare's, whom we've previously encountered as one of the more plausible candidates for the Rival Poet of Sonnets 78 to 86, in 1595 published a poem consisting of 117 stanzas entitled Ovid's Banquet of Sense, which Shakespeare may well have been familiar with and which, according to Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden edition of The Sonnets "explores Ovid's attraction to Corynna bathing through a celebration of each of the five senses, culminating in touch." And in fact Shakespeare picks up the same theme also in his own long narrative poem Venus & Adonis, where the goddess of the title waxes lyrical about the beautiful and equally eponymous youth (445-450): “But oh what banquet wert thou to the taste, Being nurse and feeder of the other four; Would they not wish the feast might ever last, And bid suspicion double-lock the door, Lest jealousy, that sour unwelcome guest, Should by his stealing in disturb the feast?” PRONUNCIATION: Note that both desire and sensual here are pronounced with two syllables: de-sire; sen-sual. |
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But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee, |
But neither my five senses – which all find fault with you, so as not to say consider you outright repellant – nor my mental faculties can dissuade this one foolish heart of mine from being beholden to you and loving you, in – as this line and the following ones suggest – a subservient, slavish, unreasonable, and foolish manner.
While we still speak of and readily recognise the five senses, we sadly no longer maintain a notion of five wits, but this was similarly commonplace in Shakespeare's time. He refers to them in King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night, and they are generally understood to be: common sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory. But in 1582 a book appeared in London under the catchy title Batman uppon Bartholome, his booke, De proprietatibus rerum, newly corrected, enlarged and ammended: with such additions as are requisite, unto every severall booke: taken foorth of the most approved authors, the like heretofore not translated in English. Profitable for all estates, as well for the benefite of the mind as the bodie. For obvious reasons mostly – though also, it has to be said, rather inadequately – referred to simply as Batman upon Bartholomew, this is, as its full title suggests, a compendious, 800-page translation, adaptation, and expansion by a man called Stephen Batman of one of the earliest precursors to the modern encyclopaedia, originally written in Latin and aptly named De proprietatibus rerum – On the Properties of Things, compiled by Bartholomew the Englishman, also known as Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a Franciscan scholar who lived and in Paris in the 13th century, with this work being published around the year 1240. Colin Burrow in his Oxford Edition of The Sonnets claims that this "is closer to Shakespeare's faculty psychology elsewhere, and lists the inner wits as feeling (by means of which the soul 'taketh heed to the bodily wits'), wit (the power of the soul to know corporeal things), imagination ('whereby the soul beholdeth the likeness of bodily things when they be absent'), reason (which adjudicates between good and bad), and intellect (which is the power to understand intellectual and material entities, such as God and his angels)." Whether or not Shakespeare is here directly referencing Batman upon Bartholomew, what is certain is that he was familiar with, and greatly influenced by, this far more nuanced, layered, and arguably more holistic conceptualisation of the mind than our, by comparison impoverished and simplistic, notion of intelligence. |
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Who leaves unswayed the likeness of a man,
Thy proud heart's slave and vassal wretch to be: |
And so neither my five senses nor my five wits are able to stop my heart from loving you, who you thus take my heart and in doing so leave behind the ungoverned, uncontrolled appearance or shape or husk of the man I once was, now capable only of being your proud heart's slave and servant and therefore a miserable wretch.
This idea of the poet turning into the mistress's slave too has appeared before, in Sonnet 133 which bemoans the fact that both Shakespeare and his young lover are now slaves to the mistress, and of course in the famous couple of Sonnets 57 & 58, where William Shakespeare, somewhat sarcastically, portrays himself as a 'sad slave' who willingly waits upon every whim of his young lover, because he has "no services to do till you require," or so he purports... |
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Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain. |
But thus far I consider my disease or sickness to be my only gain or reward, because she who entices me to commit sin with her merely gives me pain for it in return.
'Only' functions both as 'the only thing' or 'merely' and also as 'however' or 'still'; and 'plague' means the love sickness the poet feels, as well as the affliction of loving someone or something that is essentially bad for him, as well as the mistress herself, whom he comes close to calling a 'plague' in the closing couplet of Sonnet 137: In things right true my heart and eyes have erred, And to this false plague are they now transferred. The sexual overtones are not only quite clear here, but also rather unpleasant: the word 'count' in Shakespeare's day and with Shakespeare's day's pronunciation bears more than a passing resemblance to a then as now common but crude term for vagina, the mistress is not so much thanked for giving Shakespeare pleasure as blamed for making him sin, and the gain that is 'my plague' is now doubled down on with the pain she awards him. That pain may of course ostensibly just be the love pain, and/or the pain of knowing himself to be a sinner, but there is more than a hint of a suggestion that it may also be plain physical and stem from having contracted a venereal disease. |
Sonnet 141 is one of several poems in the collection that show William Shakespeare to be deeply ill at ease with his lust and love for his mistress. It may easily be argued that all of the Dark Lady Sonnets come over with a greater or lesser degree of ambiguity, with her appearance, her comportment, her smell, her touch, her sound, and most certainly her fidelity, all having either been brought into question or downright decried.
Sonnet 141 does all of the above, summarising these 'thousand errors' his mistress appears to possess and laying them out as a supposedly sensual feast, the like of which he has no appetite for. Yet he still finds his foolish heart drawn to her, and for this, he concludes, he must suffer the pain that he appears to accept as his – perhaps in a somewhat perverse way – due reward.
When we discussed Sonnet 36, we allowed ourselves exceptionally to depart from our policy and practice of listening to what the words themselves and really only the words tell us about William Shakespeare and his life, by making extensive reference to an external source, because Sonnet 36 mentions some reputational damage that our poet admits to having incurred, and so as to protect the reputation of his younger lover, he suggests that they no longer see each other, "Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame," something he quite naturally wouldn't wish upon him.
Sonnet 36 is embedded in the group that starts with Sonnet 33 which signals 'bad emotional weather' on the horizon, before Sonnets 34, 35, 40, 41, and 42 directly and unambiguously then deal with the fact that William Shakespeare's young lover has been having sex with Shakespeare's own mistress.
Although that mistress there is not named nor further described, the parallels to the Dark Lady on the one hand and the fact that stylometric analysis of these sonnets tends to place the Dark Lady Sonnets in the same bracket of likely composition as the early Fair Youth Sonnets, makes it highly likely that the mistress of the Fair Youth Sonnets is in fact the Dark Lady whom we are now talking about.
We also noted on a number of occasions now that we in all likelihood need to be thinking not only of the young man, but also of this woman as known entities in London society, and Sonnet 36, with its
separable spite,
Which, though it alter not love's sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love's delight
prompted us to wonder what this 'spite' might be: who is talking about Shakespeare and his young lover, why, and in what tones?
Now, we must at this point take a brief step back and acknowledge: we don't know. There may have been any manner and any number of rumours, gossip, scandal about the emerging poet and playwright, his obviously high profile young male lover, and a woman who on all accounts that we can directly, and even more on accounts we can at best indirectly and speculatively, associate with her, is leading something of a notorious existence in what is after all still a relatively small city with an even smaller inner circle of people who matter.
But the external source we quoted and which it may serve us to return to now is the following. And I am repeating here in places near verbatim things I said a bit over two years ago when I recorded the episode on Sonnet 36; so bear with and allow me to remind you of what this was all about.
In September 1594 – and this sits very much within a plausible timeframe for the composition of both Sonnet 36 and of these Dark Lady Sonnets – a writer going by the name Henry Willobie, probably a pseudonym this, published a narrative poem entitled Willobie His Avisa, which became exceptionally popular, going into several reprints, even though – or quite possibly because – it was also censored and banned for a while, five years after its initial publication.
The piece is interesting, and in the context particularly of Sonnets 34, 35, 40, 41, and 42, and then 133, 134, and soon 144 potentially highly relevant, because it talks of a "W. S." and his, as its author puts it, "familiar" friend "H. W." who share "the curtesy" of a "like passion" for a lady, resulting in a "like infection."
The initials H. W. are – no doubt among many others, as they are not uncommon – those of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton who is a strong – I would, as you know if you've been listening to this podcast, by now possibly argue the strongest – candidate for the Fair Youth, while W. S. quite obviously matches our Will.
Without wishing to read too much into any of this, and whether any of it is based in actual fact, in mere gossip, or in some person's fertile imagination, this much we can say: in September 1594, somebody publishes a piece of print which
- is so full of coded references, allusions, and nudging innuendo that the general public lap it up even though it isn't very good,
- the authorities ban until after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, and
- features as a central constellation one that appears to mirror to some extent events mentioned in sonnets that could absolutely have been written around that time.
That is all we know, but that is not nothing.
We don't know whether Willobie meant to implicate William Shakespeare with his W. S. character, let alone Henry Wriothesley with his familiar friend H. W., and we don't know what exactly the implication is of the claim contained in the publication that “there is some thing under these false names and showes that hath been done truly.”
But the reason this poem, published in pamphlet format at the time, may be relevant also to Sonnet 141, which, after all, makes no mention of the young man or any of the woman's elsewhere categorically acknowledged other lovers, is that it speaks of a 'like infection'. And this, going by the tone of this piece and by the deliberately scandalous framing of it, is unlikely to mean an 'infection of the heart merely with love'. It is more than a little likely to suggest that whoever this W. S. and his H. W. may be, they both picked up the same infectious disease from the 'passion' they both shared with that lady.
It may all be idle gossip, malicious slander, and simply made up. But what if there were, as its anonymised author insists, "some thing ... that hath been done truly." Well, it would go some way to explain Shakespeare's state of mind. Which, it has to be said, in some of these sonnets is troubled, to put it mildly. If you were listening to my conversation with Professor Phyllis Rackin on Shakespeare and Women, you will have heard her express fairly grave concerns about some of his utterances in these sonnets, and for good reason. Some sound positively disgusted with himself, with his mistress, with his lust for her. There are any number of possible reasons for this, but one that would immediately shine a light on it and provide some context for clearheaded contemplation of his reality would be if indeed both he and his young lover – who, you may remember, Shakespeare suggests may not, prior to meeting this Dark Lady, have been all that sexually experienced with women – ended up catching some sexually transmitted disease from her.
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain
acquires a whole lot more visceral a ring, if that is the case.
And, as we have also noted on more than one occasion, such a scenario is far from far-fetched. Venereal disease was rife in Shakespeare’s London, particularly syphilis, and anyone engaging in sex with a partner who was known to have multiple lovers faced a significant risk of infection. Shakespeare was aware of this, as were his fellow poets at the time, whose verses are littered with references to 'the pox' and its symptoms
And Sonnet 144 will put one additional angle on this, directly, as we mentioned, bringing back into the constellation Shakespeare's young lover. Before then, though, in Sonnet 142 Shakespeare further elaborates on the notions of sin and virtue, love and hate in relation to his mistress's sexual conduct, and in Sonnet 143 he taps into a decidedly more lighthearted register to almost caricature his chasing after a woman who he wishes were kinder, more motherly to him, while she is chasing some fowl that is trying to make an escape from her...
Sonnet 141 does all of the above, summarising these 'thousand errors' his mistress appears to possess and laying them out as a supposedly sensual feast, the like of which he has no appetite for. Yet he still finds his foolish heart drawn to her, and for this, he concludes, he must suffer the pain that he appears to accept as his – perhaps in a somewhat perverse way – due reward.
When we discussed Sonnet 36, we allowed ourselves exceptionally to depart from our policy and practice of listening to what the words themselves and really only the words tell us about William Shakespeare and his life, by making extensive reference to an external source, because Sonnet 36 mentions some reputational damage that our poet admits to having incurred, and so as to protect the reputation of his younger lover, he suggests that they no longer see each other, "Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame," something he quite naturally wouldn't wish upon him.
Sonnet 36 is embedded in the group that starts with Sonnet 33 which signals 'bad emotional weather' on the horizon, before Sonnets 34, 35, 40, 41, and 42 directly and unambiguously then deal with the fact that William Shakespeare's young lover has been having sex with Shakespeare's own mistress.
Although that mistress there is not named nor further described, the parallels to the Dark Lady on the one hand and the fact that stylometric analysis of these sonnets tends to place the Dark Lady Sonnets in the same bracket of likely composition as the early Fair Youth Sonnets, makes it highly likely that the mistress of the Fair Youth Sonnets is in fact the Dark Lady whom we are now talking about.
We also noted on a number of occasions now that we in all likelihood need to be thinking not only of the young man, but also of this woman as known entities in London society, and Sonnet 36, with its
separable spite,
Which, though it alter not love's sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love's delight
prompted us to wonder what this 'spite' might be: who is talking about Shakespeare and his young lover, why, and in what tones?
Now, we must at this point take a brief step back and acknowledge: we don't know. There may have been any manner and any number of rumours, gossip, scandal about the emerging poet and playwright, his obviously high profile young male lover, and a woman who on all accounts that we can directly, and even more on accounts we can at best indirectly and speculatively, associate with her, is leading something of a notorious existence in what is after all still a relatively small city with an even smaller inner circle of people who matter.
But the external source we quoted and which it may serve us to return to now is the following. And I am repeating here in places near verbatim things I said a bit over two years ago when I recorded the episode on Sonnet 36; so bear with and allow me to remind you of what this was all about.
In September 1594 – and this sits very much within a plausible timeframe for the composition of both Sonnet 36 and of these Dark Lady Sonnets – a writer going by the name Henry Willobie, probably a pseudonym this, published a narrative poem entitled Willobie His Avisa, which became exceptionally popular, going into several reprints, even though – or quite possibly because – it was also censored and banned for a while, five years after its initial publication.
The piece is interesting, and in the context particularly of Sonnets 34, 35, 40, 41, and 42, and then 133, 134, and soon 144 potentially highly relevant, because it talks of a "W. S." and his, as its author puts it, "familiar" friend "H. W." who share "the curtesy" of a "like passion" for a lady, resulting in a "like infection."
The initials H. W. are – no doubt among many others, as they are not uncommon – those of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton who is a strong – I would, as you know if you've been listening to this podcast, by now possibly argue the strongest – candidate for the Fair Youth, while W. S. quite obviously matches our Will.
Without wishing to read too much into any of this, and whether any of it is based in actual fact, in mere gossip, or in some person's fertile imagination, this much we can say: in September 1594, somebody publishes a piece of print which
- is so full of coded references, allusions, and nudging innuendo that the general public lap it up even though it isn't very good,
- the authorities ban until after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, and
- features as a central constellation one that appears to mirror to some extent events mentioned in sonnets that could absolutely have been written around that time.
That is all we know, but that is not nothing.
We don't know whether Willobie meant to implicate William Shakespeare with his W. S. character, let alone Henry Wriothesley with his familiar friend H. W., and we don't know what exactly the implication is of the claim contained in the publication that “there is some thing under these false names and showes that hath been done truly.”
But the reason this poem, published in pamphlet format at the time, may be relevant also to Sonnet 141, which, after all, makes no mention of the young man or any of the woman's elsewhere categorically acknowledged other lovers, is that it speaks of a 'like infection'. And this, going by the tone of this piece and by the deliberately scandalous framing of it, is unlikely to mean an 'infection of the heart merely with love'. It is more than a little likely to suggest that whoever this W. S. and his H. W. may be, they both picked up the same infectious disease from the 'passion' they both shared with that lady.
It may all be idle gossip, malicious slander, and simply made up. But what if there were, as its anonymised author insists, "some thing ... that hath been done truly." Well, it would go some way to explain Shakespeare's state of mind. Which, it has to be said, in some of these sonnets is troubled, to put it mildly. If you were listening to my conversation with Professor Phyllis Rackin on Shakespeare and Women, you will have heard her express fairly grave concerns about some of his utterances in these sonnets, and for good reason. Some sound positively disgusted with himself, with his mistress, with his lust for her. There are any number of possible reasons for this, but one that would immediately shine a light on it and provide some context for clearheaded contemplation of his reality would be if indeed both he and his young lover – who, you may remember, Shakespeare suggests may not, prior to meeting this Dark Lady, have been all that sexually experienced with women – ended up catching some sexually transmitted disease from her.
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain
acquires a whole lot more visceral a ring, if that is the case.
And, as we have also noted on more than one occasion, such a scenario is far from far-fetched. Venereal disease was rife in Shakespeare’s London, particularly syphilis, and anyone engaging in sex with a partner who was known to have multiple lovers faced a significant risk of infection. Shakespeare was aware of this, as were his fellow poets at the time, whose verses are littered with references to 'the pox' and its symptoms
And Sonnet 144 will put one additional angle on this, directly, as we mentioned, bringing back into the constellation Shakespeare's young lover. Before then, though, in Sonnet 142 Shakespeare further elaborates on the notions of sin and virtue, love and hate in relation to his mistress's sexual conduct, and in Sonnet 143 he taps into a decidedly more lighthearted register to almost caricature his chasing after a woman who he wishes were kinder, more motherly to him, while she is chasing some fowl that is trying to make an escape from her...
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!