Sonnet 144: Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair
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Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still. The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. To win me soon to hell, my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side, And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, Wooing his purity with her foul pride. And whether that my angel be turned fiend, Suspect I may, yet not directly tell, But being both from me, both to each friend, I guess one angel in another's hell. Yet this shall I never know, but live in doubt, Till my bad angel fire my good one out. |
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Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still. |
I have two loves, meaning two lovers or people I love, and these are sources to me of comfort and of despair, and they perpetually or forever seem to me just like two spirits, as in supernatural or non-physical beings, whereby in Shakespeare's day and vocabulary, a spirit equally has the potential to be good or bad, as we are just about to see.
Whether both these spirits are simultaneously a source of comfort and of despair to our poet, or whether he means to say that one of them is a love of comfort and the other one of despair is not immediately obvious, but although he is about to make a distinction between the two, from everything we know about these two individuals who together with him make up this love triangle, a reasonable interpretation favours the former: that the duality of comfort and despair is internal to itself, thus adding an extra layer of complexity, rather than merely being a function of the two different natures of these spirits: |
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The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. |
And these two natures are now distinguished: the better of these two spirits is an angel, and he is a man 'right fair', which here as on previous occasions implies not only that he is of a light skin tone but also that he is generally fair as in beautiful; whereby the 'worser spirit', who significantly does not merit the term 'angel', is a woman 'coloured ill', which similarly suggests that she is on the one hand of a darker complexion than the Elizabethan ideal of beauty demands, but also that she has an overall unfavourable appearance.
This tallies obviously and directly with the description of the Fair Youth in the Fair Youth section of the Sonnets, and with the Dark Lady in previous sonnets within this part of the collection. The famous Sonnet 130, My Mistress Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun, is all about this woman not being beyond description beautiful, not a 'goddess', as other poets might describe their mistresses, but very much a human whose breath reeks and who treads on the ground, and Sonnet 131 spells out to her: Yet in good faith some say that thee behold, Thy face hath not the power to make love groan, while Sonnet 137 goes one step further still, speaking not to the mistress, but once more about her, this time to love itself: Thou blind fool love, what dost thou to mine eyes, That they behold and see not what they see: They know what beauty is, see where it lies, Yet what the best is, take the worst to be. And, as we noted at the time, vice versa: my eyes, being blinded by love, consider that which isn't truly beautiful, namely my mistress, to be the best thing there is in the world. PRONUNCIATION: Note that spirit here, unlike 'spirit' in line 2, is pronounced as one syllable: sprit. |
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To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side, |
And now, so as to gain control over me and to drag me down to hell, my evil female spirit tempts my better male angel from my side...
This is unusual behaviour, if not for a sexually voracious woman, then for a devil or demonic spirit: she, the Dark Lady, is seducing my beautiful lover away from me, and she does so to 'win me soon to hell'. which here most likely simply means that she puts me in a hell of suffering and pain that I experience for losing my lovely man to her. The line could also be read to mean that so as to win me soon to her hell – with 'hell' here as in line 12 below meaning 'her vagina' – she is seducing my young man, but that, in view of the poet's pleas in several of these sonnets for her to grant him sex as she does other lovers does not make sense: she does not need to win him over to have sex with her, as he is patently willing and in fact keen to do so all by himself already. The Quarto Edition here for 'side' has 'sight', but this is widely accepted to be a printing error, and the emendation to 'side' is strongly supported by the facts that a) the line needs to rhyme with 'pride' in line 8 below, b) angels, as spiritual beings inherently invisible, are generally and traditionally and throughout Shakespeare's works not considered to be in someone's sight, but to stand or walk by someone's side, and c) this is one of two sonnets that appear in The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of poetry published in 1598 or 1599, where the word is rendered as 'side'. |
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And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride. |
And her intention is to corrupt him, my saint, to be a devil with and like her, and in order to achieve this she woos him and his purity, for which read his innocence and hitherto incorruptible nature, with her ugly pride, whereby 'pride' here may mean, as we understand it, confidence and perhaps excessive self-satisfaction, also boastfulness, as well as ostentation, but also, by more subliminal suggestion, sexual desire and indeed sexual organ.
Shakespeare, throughout these sonnets, uses 'pride' to mean subtly and not so subtly different and overlapping things. In Sonnet 25 it quite straightforwardly refers to the self-confidence of people who happen to be in a ruler's good books: Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread But as the marigold at the sun's eye, And in themselves their pride lies buried, For at a frown they in their glory die. Although, depending on who the prince is and who the favourite, there is no reason to rule out a sexual dimension to this pride and glory too. Sonnet 52 gave the word a much more obvious sensual, indeed sexual connotation: So is the time that keeps you as my chest, Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide, To make some special instant special blest, By new unfolding his imprisoned pride. Sonnet 76 deployed 'pride' purely in the context of literary inventiveness, while Sonnet 80 came close to mean another man's physical endowment: Or, being wrecked, I am a worthless boat, He of tall building and of goodly pride. Sonnet 91, at once triumphantly claims and meekly concedes: And having thee, of all men's pride I boast, Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take All this away, and me most wretched make. There are further instances in the sonnets, but this probably suffices to illustrate that the lady's 'foul pride' is more than just her being inordinately proud of herself. |
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And whether that my angel be turned fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell, |
And so whether my young man has been turned from a lovely, by implication innocent, angel into a fiend, meaning a bad, corrupted, even evil and sinning spirit by her, is something that I can suspect, but not outright declare, because, as is the suggestion, I just don't know.
This would appear to contract Sonnet 133 – "Is't not enough to torture me alone, | But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be?" and even more directly Sonnet 134, "So now I have confessed that he is thine," which both communicate zero doubt in the poet's mind – and therefore would appear to serve to leave none in ours – that the Dark Lady has in fact seduced the young man, unless Shakespeare there is simply talking about amorous affections and 'lovemaking' in a chaste, as yet unconsummated anachronistically Victorian way, whereas here he is very clearly and explicitly talking about sex: |
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But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell. |
But since they are currently as I write this both away from me, and they are also both friends to each other, I have to guess that one angel – my beautiful young man – is in the hell of the other: my mistress.
Here now, as in Sonnet 129, we need to entertain no doubt that Shakespeare is referring to his mistress's vagina as 'hell'. It was a common term used in that sense at the time, and the only way this sonnet really makes sense is for this meaning to be fully and rather forcefully intended. |
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Yet this shall I never know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out. |
But whether or not this is actually the case, whether or not my good angel is in the hell of my bad angel – by implication even as we speak, but certainly around this time and while they are both away from me – is something I cannot know until my bad angel has 'fired' my good angel out from her 'hell'.
This 'fire out' comes with multiple layers of meanings: firing or smoking out a place, such as a cave or a lair, was and still is common practice to get rid of something or – nowadays perhaps less often – someone that shouldn't be there; hell is traditionally a place of brimstone and fire, so if a devil 'fires out' a good angel from their den of iniquity that would simply imply that they have done their deed and can now dispose of the creature or person they no longer need, and once again a suggestion appears to be contained in the context of a woman's 'hell' from which a young man is being ejected through and with 'fire', that this burning sensation is brought about by a venereal disease that she passes on to him. Shakespeare uses 'fire' as a metaphor for lust, love, and passion; though less blatantly than his contemporaries for sexually transmitted disease, especially syphilis, which, as we mentioned also recently in our episode on Sonnet 141, in London of the 16th century was rife. Thomas Nashe, for example, in The Choice of Valentines, around 1593 and thus exactly in the same period declares: “But lust is fire, and fires will waste apace,” which may already be quite suggestive, while Thomas Dekker, a little later, in 1609, but rather more explicitly, in The Honest Whore minces no words: “Your breath smells of lechery, your skin itches of the French pox, your eyes sparkle with the fire of hell.” PRONUNCIATION: Note that never here is pronounced as one syllable: [nehr]; as is fire: [fyer]. |
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 of the Sonnets 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.
Sonnet 144 is not difficult to understand. Its meaning is straightforward and direct, which naturally and unsurprisingly adds to its power. It is nonetheless pregnant with symbolism, and this symbolism may run deeper than at first meets the eye.
Obvious, and easily recognised is the classical battle for the soul that serves as the framework for this portrayal of a tug of love. In his narrative poem Psychomachia, the Roman Christian poet Prudentius who lived in the second half of the 4th century – born 348, died in the early 400s – has the personified virtues of Faith, Chastity, Patience, Humility, Sobriety, Good Works, and Concord, fight their personified contrary vices Idolatry, Lust, Wrath, Pride, Indulgence, Greed, and Discord for the soul of man, a theme that has since been reworked often and forms the core also, of course, of the Faustian conflict between the forces of good and evil — Lucifer, represented through his 'agent' Mephistopheles, and God.
Still, Shakespeare's sonnet is not a straightforward psychomachia: although he ventures that his 'female evil' is attempting to win him to hell, her principal endeavour in this situation seems to be to seduce his angelic young lover for her own delectation. The good spirit and the bad, the angel and the devil are here not so much in battle for Shakespeare's soul, though his soul may yet suffer the consequences from their struggle, but engaged in a dance of their own the which, according to Shakespeare, is led by the lady, with the youth man being drawn into her sphere without much agency of his own.
Just how truthful a portrayal of the situation or how astute and assessment of it this is may be questionable. Elsewhere in these sonnets the young man is given a great deal of autonomy and shown to possess abundant confidence of his own, so the idea that he simply falls victim to this femme fatale is a little far fetched. That said, the sonnet further supports, if not indeed confirms the perception we have repeatedly received, most particularly through Sonnets 133 and 134, though less so through the complementary poems in the Fair Youth segment, 34, 35; 40, 41, and 42, that the Dark Lady is the seductress and the Fair Youth is at that time the inexperienced, therefore 'innocent' prey.
This in itself though is an element that some see as inherently, culturally, and catastrophically misogynistic, others perhaps more as the result of several millennia of human social, sexual, and sensual as well as sensical development: the portrayal of woman as the downfall of man. Woman as the seductress, as the embodiment of physical, sexual, earthly, and therefore base love, whilst an elated, intellectual, cerebral, and therefore pure love can only be experienced by men with men. From Plato through Christianity right to the 21st Century American feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye expression is given to a postulation, also celebration, also fear, also condemnation, also, who knows, realisation that in broad brushstroke terms, and accepting that this may be a wild generalisation, men, irrespective of sexuality, fundamentally are comfortable with and love men, while women, irrespective of sexuality, fundamentally are comfortable with and love women. Or as Frye puts it, less cautiously than this in her Politics of Reality:
"All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex. Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”
To what extent this be true and to what extent one wishes this to be true are topics for deliberation far outside the remit of a podcast on William Shakespeare's Sonnets, but what we can say of Sonnet 144 is that it is steeped in a tradition that reflects such an understanding of us as humans.
This may and does invite also of course a reading of this sonnet which juxtaposes not only 'two loves' as in 'two people who are being loved', but also two kinds of love: one that is pure, innocent, angelic, and in itself non-sexual, that with our Fair Youth, and one that is lustful, sensuous, corruptible and corrupted, and by definition sexual, the one with the Dark Lady.
This, as you will be aware if you have been on this journey of discovery with me for any duration, I consider so unlikely as to call it implausible. Several of these sonnets suggest strongly that the relationship between William Shakespeare and his young man is also a physical, indeed sexual, one; Sonnets 31 and 32 and especially 51 and 52 for example – and these are not alone – more than less hint at this.
What they do not spell out, of course, and what may yet be of some relevance, is how we should imagine or may define a 'physical' or indeed 'sexual' relationship with the Fair Youth.
With the Dark Lady that is no mystery. Shakespeare is as explicit as sonneteering will allow in stating that both he, and his young man, and some scope of other men find themselves in her 'hell', elsewhere in Sonnets 135 and 136 less drastically referred to as her 'will', in each and every case though meaning her vagina.
Sonnet 144 does not resolve itself: it ends on a poetic cliffhanger. Our Will says he does not know just what the state of affairs is between his young man and his mistress. And that in itself is fascinating, because the parallel passage in the Fair Youth Sonnets, of which we need not seriously doubt that it refers to this same episode, leaves no room for such uncertainty:
Sonnet 40:
Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all.
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call:
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
Sonnet 42:
That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet, it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief:
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Both these sonnets yield into forgiveness, though none, it may be argued, too sincere:
Sonnet 40:
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet, love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.
Sonnet 42:
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her,
And for my sake, even so, doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross.
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one.
Sweet flattery, then she loves but me alone.
This sonnet here does no such thing. It keeps itself suspended. And therefore, so are we.
One more detail of symbolism and therefore potential meaning may be relevant, though we can't be at all certain how. This sonnet is numbered 144, which is the product of 12 X 12.
144, or twelve squared, has significant biblical and astronomical resonances: twelve apostles, twelve months, twelve signs of the zodiac. Twelve hours in the day. The number 144 may therefore be considered to symbolise totality, perfection, and completion.
And indeed: this is the last of the sonnets to mention both the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth. It is also the first and only one in the entire collection to positively and identifiably reference both. It shows us William Shakespeare at his most torn and at his most open. It encapsulates in the dense 12 lines that make up its body one of the fundamental conflicts not only he himself encounters, but that any human encounters, after all: which forces to give in to, what kind of love to choose. And its concluding couplet – when in Sonnet 126, the last of the Fair Youth Sonnets, it was entirely absent – here is present, but concludes nothing.
Whether or not Shakespeare himself, or even someone else who may or may not have collated these sonnets on his behalf with or without his permission, had this in mind and meant to signify something – or anything – by giving this sonnet the number 144, we simply don't know. But the possibility that this or any other meaning is herein contained does certainly exist.
What is telling though and what rather supports the notion that 144 forms a deliberate numerical milestone in the collection is that the next sonnet is an entirely different species. It is literally and literarily a different form of poem, consisting, as it does, of 14 octosyllabic lines instead of iambic pentameters; its tone is simpler, far less laden, and its subject, so most scholars today believe, is not the Dark Lady, nor the Fair Youth, nor anyone other than Shakespeare's wife, Anne.
After that, there are seven more sonnets which serve almost as an epilogue, reflecting as they do, on what such love as this is doing to my soul, and then the two allegorical poems that correspondingly act as a coda: they have to do with lust and passion, but not much at all with a love that's true, and nothing whatever with the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady, or Anne, or so, at least, it appear...
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 of the Sonnets 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.
Sonnet 144 is not difficult to understand. Its meaning is straightforward and direct, which naturally and unsurprisingly adds to its power. It is nonetheless pregnant with symbolism, and this symbolism may run deeper than at first meets the eye.
Obvious, and easily recognised is the classical battle for the soul that serves as the framework for this portrayal of a tug of love. In his narrative poem Psychomachia, the Roman Christian poet Prudentius who lived in the second half of the 4th century – born 348, died in the early 400s – has the personified virtues of Faith, Chastity, Patience, Humility, Sobriety, Good Works, and Concord, fight their personified contrary vices Idolatry, Lust, Wrath, Pride, Indulgence, Greed, and Discord for the soul of man, a theme that has since been reworked often and forms the core also, of course, of the Faustian conflict between the forces of good and evil — Lucifer, represented through his 'agent' Mephistopheles, and God.
Still, Shakespeare's sonnet is not a straightforward psychomachia: although he ventures that his 'female evil' is attempting to win him to hell, her principal endeavour in this situation seems to be to seduce his angelic young lover for her own delectation. The good spirit and the bad, the angel and the devil are here not so much in battle for Shakespeare's soul, though his soul may yet suffer the consequences from their struggle, but engaged in a dance of their own the which, according to Shakespeare, is led by the lady, with the youth man being drawn into her sphere without much agency of his own.
Just how truthful a portrayal of the situation or how astute and assessment of it this is may be questionable. Elsewhere in these sonnets the young man is given a great deal of autonomy and shown to possess abundant confidence of his own, so the idea that he simply falls victim to this femme fatale is a little far fetched. That said, the sonnet further supports, if not indeed confirms the perception we have repeatedly received, most particularly through Sonnets 133 and 134, though less so through the complementary poems in the Fair Youth segment, 34, 35; 40, 41, and 42, that the Dark Lady is the seductress and the Fair Youth is at that time the inexperienced, therefore 'innocent' prey.
This in itself though is an element that some see as inherently, culturally, and catastrophically misogynistic, others perhaps more as the result of several millennia of human social, sexual, and sensual as well as sensical development: the portrayal of woman as the downfall of man. Woman as the seductress, as the embodiment of physical, sexual, earthly, and therefore base love, whilst an elated, intellectual, cerebral, and therefore pure love can only be experienced by men with men. From Plato through Christianity right to the 21st Century American feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye expression is given to a postulation, also celebration, also fear, also condemnation, also, who knows, realisation that in broad brushstroke terms, and accepting that this may be a wild generalisation, men, irrespective of sexuality, fundamentally are comfortable with and love men, while women, irrespective of sexuality, fundamentally are comfortable with and love women. Or as Frye puts it, less cautiously than this in her Politics of Reality:
"All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex. Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”
To what extent this be true and to what extent one wishes this to be true are topics for deliberation far outside the remit of a podcast on William Shakespeare's Sonnets, but what we can say of Sonnet 144 is that it is steeped in a tradition that reflects such an understanding of us as humans.
This may and does invite also of course a reading of this sonnet which juxtaposes not only 'two loves' as in 'two people who are being loved', but also two kinds of love: one that is pure, innocent, angelic, and in itself non-sexual, that with our Fair Youth, and one that is lustful, sensuous, corruptible and corrupted, and by definition sexual, the one with the Dark Lady.
This, as you will be aware if you have been on this journey of discovery with me for any duration, I consider so unlikely as to call it implausible. Several of these sonnets suggest strongly that the relationship between William Shakespeare and his young man is also a physical, indeed sexual, one; Sonnets 31 and 32 and especially 51 and 52 for example – and these are not alone – more than less hint at this.
What they do not spell out, of course, and what may yet be of some relevance, is how we should imagine or may define a 'physical' or indeed 'sexual' relationship with the Fair Youth.
With the Dark Lady that is no mystery. Shakespeare is as explicit as sonneteering will allow in stating that both he, and his young man, and some scope of other men find themselves in her 'hell', elsewhere in Sonnets 135 and 136 less drastically referred to as her 'will', in each and every case though meaning her vagina.
Sonnet 144 does not resolve itself: it ends on a poetic cliffhanger. Our Will says he does not know just what the state of affairs is between his young man and his mistress. And that in itself is fascinating, because the parallel passage in the Fair Youth Sonnets, of which we need not seriously doubt that it refers to this same episode, leaves no room for such uncertainty:
Sonnet 40:
Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all.
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call:
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
Sonnet 42:
That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet, it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief:
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Both these sonnets yield into forgiveness, though none, it may be argued, too sincere:
Sonnet 40:
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet, love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.
Sonnet 42:
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her,
And for my sake, even so, doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross.
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one.
Sweet flattery, then she loves but me alone.
This sonnet here does no such thing. It keeps itself suspended. And therefore, so are we.
One more detail of symbolism and therefore potential meaning may be relevant, though we can't be at all certain how. This sonnet is numbered 144, which is the product of 12 X 12.
144, or twelve squared, has significant biblical and astronomical resonances: twelve apostles, twelve months, twelve signs of the zodiac. Twelve hours in the day. The number 144 may therefore be considered to symbolise totality, perfection, and completion.
And indeed: this is the last of the sonnets to mention both the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth. It is also the first and only one in the entire collection to positively and identifiably reference both. It shows us William Shakespeare at his most torn and at his most open. It encapsulates in the dense 12 lines that make up its body one of the fundamental conflicts not only he himself encounters, but that any human encounters, after all: which forces to give in to, what kind of love to choose. And its concluding couplet – when in Sonnet 126, the last of the Fair Youth Sonnets, it was entirely absent – here is present, but concludes nothing.
Whether or not Shakespeare himself, or even someone else who may or may not have collated these sonnets on his behalf with or without his permission, had this in mind and meant to signify something – or anything – by giving this sonnet the number 144, we simply don't know. But the possibility that this or any other meaning is herein contained does certainly exist.
What is telling though and what rather supports the notion that 144 forms a deliberate numerical milestone in the collection is that the next sonnet is an entirely different species. It is literally and literarily a different form of poem, consisting, as it does, of 14 octosyllabic lines instead of iambic pentameters; its tone is simpler, far less laden, and its subject, so most scholars today believe, is not the Dark Lady, nor the Fair Youth, nor anyone other than Shakespeare's wife, Anne.
After that, there are seven more sonnets which serve almost as an epilogue, reflecting as they do, on what such love as this is doing to my soul, and then the two allegorical poems that correspondingly act as a coda: they have to do with lust and passion, but not much at all with a love that's true, and nothing whatever with the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady, or Anne, or so, at least, it appear...
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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!