Sonnet 147: My Love Is as a Fever, Longing Still
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My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease, Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, Th'uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, and I, desperate now, approve, Desire is death, which physic did except. Past cure I am, now reason is past care, And frantic mad with ever more unrest, My thoughts and my discourse as mad men's are, At random from the truth, vainly expressed. For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. |
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LISTEN TO SONNETCAST EPISODE 147
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My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease, |
My love is like the kind of fever which always and forever longs for and desires that precisely which in fact benefits and reinforces the disease itself, rather than me, the patient...
We today would think of such a 'fever' more as an addiction: a craving or longing for something that only ever serves to make the need for having it, and therefore the addiction itself, stronger. 'Still' as so very often in Shakespeare here means 'always' or 'forever', though in the context it also resonates in the to us more familiar meaning of 'still ongoing', as something that has been the case for a while, and in spite of better judgement by reason, as is about to be suggested, still continues. |
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Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th'uncertain sickly appetite to please. |
...and in this diseased state, my love feeds on that which actually preserves and nurtures the illness itself, and it does so to fulfil my fickle, unsteady, wavering, and sickly or unwholesome appetite, for which in the context of love read my lust or desire.
The analogy to a proper addiction continues, now spelling out that my love feeds on, and thus tries to sustain itself with, something that makes the desire for it ever stronger, but that at the same time makes me only weaker, because it is, after all, a sickness doing me harm. In the previous sonnet, Shakespeare implored his own soul to be fed 'within', and not to nurture and reinforce its vessel, the body. In this way, so the sonnet, the soul would be able to "feed on death that feeds on men" and in doing so overcome death. We don't know whether William Shakespeare here deliberately creates a link to Sonnet 146 by once again bringing in the notion of 'feeding', but it is certainly possible and would make sense in the progression we've noted from Sonnet 144, through 145 to 146 and now this sonnet. Of particular interest also is the fact that he calls this desire of his an 'uncertain, sickly appetite'. It suggests on the one hand that he is uncertain or unsure of it or of its validity – which comes as no great surprise to us, following earlier sonnets in this, the Dark Lady, portion of the collection – but also, on the other hand, that this appetite, this desire, is unsteady or comes and goes at a whim, which would appear to contradict previous poems addressed to or about the Dark Lady, including, as it happens, this one, which otherwise thinks of this fever as fairly unabated and full-on. |
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My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, |
My reason, which acts as the physician or doctor to my love, is angry that its prescriptions which were meant to cure me of my disease have not been kept, and has therefore left me...
The prescriptions are not further described here, though having been issued by reason we can imagine what they would entail, and the notion itself of reason completely abandoning the lover because it just can't be doing with this self-destructive, idiotic nonsense that is 'love' any more is rather arresting... |
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and, I desperate now, approve,
Desire is death, which physic did except. |
...and I, who I am desperate by now, meaning both, in a desperate state and in desperate need of help, find out from this experience that the desire, to which medical advice took exception and which it counselled measures against, equals death.
Chapter 8, Verse 6 in The Book of Romans of The Bible declares: "For the wisdom of the flesh is death: but the wisdom of the Spirit is life and peace," (Geneva Version) And this creates a further, and indeed even stronger, link to the previous sonnet now, with the desire of the body being unable to overcome death, quite unlike the pure intentions of the nurtured and well cared-for soul. 'Approve' at the time can mean both, to discover from experience, and also to be living proof of something, while the phrase 'which physic did except' is a particularly succinct way of saying that the informed, competent view of 'physic' – here medicine as a field of expertise and thus a physician's knowledge – is against something, in this case the pursuit of the fulfilment of physical desire. PRONUNCIATION: Note that desire here has two syllables: de-sire. ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION: Note that in OP approve rhymes with love above in a short 'o' sound similar to our 'dove'. |
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Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic mad with ever more unrest, |
Now that my reason is past care I am therefore past cure, and frantically, as in hyperactively, mad with this ever worsening unrest that my love puts me to.
The expression 'past cure, past care' is proverbial, normally meaning that once something is beyond cure and simply cannot be helped, it is also, or may justly be considered to be, past one's care: if you can't change it, move on and stop worrying about it, so to speak. Here, Shakespeare turns the causality upside down, saying: now that his reason has stopped caring for and about him and thoroughly abandoned him, he is beyond cure and cannot further be helped. |
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My thoughts and my discourse as mad men's are,
At random from the truth, vainly expressed. |
And in this feverish condition that I am now in, my thoughts as well as my speech are like those of a madman, missing the point, veering off the truth, or haphazardly, erratically talking around it, and expressing themselves ineffectually and therefore, in effect, in vain.
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For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. |
And this is evidenced in the circumstance that I have sworn blind, as it were, that you are beautiful and thought of you as worthy, when in fact you are black as hell and dark as night.
The expressions 'black as hell' and 'dark as night' are of course cliches every bit as well-trodden as is the expression 'as day follows night' in Sonnet 145. Interestingly though, in this instance here, and quite in contrast to Sonnet 145, editors across the board simply note that what Shakespeare is saying is 'proverbial', without going into critical overdrive to emphasise its comparative triteness. Noteworthy about this closing couplet with its stock conclusion is that with it our poet returns to the preoccupations that initiated the Dark Lady section of The Sonnets: the lady's black hair, black eyes, and darker skin toned appearance against the Elizabethan ideal of a 'fair' complexion as the standard of desirable beauty, and in fact he combines it here even more strongly than before, in Sonnets 131 and 132, with a notion of darkness as moral deficiency, against the bright light of a pure and untarnished soul. 'Bright' here then does not have the meaning of 'intelligent' or 'clever' as it does with us, but refers to, as Colin Burrow in the Oxford Edition of the Sonnets puts it, a "shining moral worth." |
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.
In Sonnet 119, William Shakespeare asked himself:
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted
In the distraction of this madding fever.
And, having experienced such 'evils' as those he subjected himself to, comes to the conclusion:
So I return rebuked to my content
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.
Whether with this he was referring to his relationship with the Dark Lady – possibly among others – we don't know, but what comes across strongly in this disconcertingly simple and straightforward poem is the unease he finds himself in for still, after all, desiring his mistress. This is not ordinary sonneteering.
Peter Ackroyd in his generally excellent and thoroughly researched biography of Shakespeare, when it comes to the Sonnets communicates a tangible discomfort with the idea that they could be directly related to William Shakespeare's own experience and goes to some considerable length to position them effectively as exercises in poetry, as a highly competitive man's efforts to outdo his contemporaries in wit and verbal dexterity at the height of the sonnet fashion, as anything other than a man working through his own emotional turmoil:
"Instead of speculating about the personages addressed, it is more appropriate to speculate about the speaker. In the only sense that matters, Shakespeare addresses the sonnets to himself. His muse here is midwife, rather than mother."
And as we shall see, especially as we look at the last remaining few sonnets in the Dark Lady section of the collection, he does actually have a point. Although he, somewhat reluctantly, also allows:
"It would be wrong to argue, of course, that the plethora of outside parallels means that there is no parallel at all. It is certainly possible that elements of Shakespeare's emotional life entered the poems just as they entered the plays." (Shakespeare, The Biography, 291)
In broad terms, it is, as we have noted and discussed before at some length a stance that was taken by scholars particularly during the second half of the 20th century in the wake of French deconstructionist philosophy having established itself as a primary force in literary analysis, and that I, as you will know if you've been following this podcast, consider to be, again in broad terms, simplistic, ill-founded, and improbable. You'll hear me talk about this in the episodes on Sonnet 104 and the special on The Fair Youth, if you're interested.
Sonnet 147 is a particularly interesting case in this debate of 'autobiography' vs 'abstraction from real life'. On the one hand it follows a well-trodden path: my desire is a disease – an addiction really – it is bad for me but I just can't help feeling and feeding it even though I know it makes me only ever more sick in this sense. This would shore up the argument that the sonnet may just be Shakespeare toying with one of the sonneteer's stock themes.
Also just about conceivable is the possibility that William Shakespeare simply invented a black haired, black eyed, darker skinned mistress to juxtapose her with his 'Fair Youth', and here enjoys for the third or fourth time, depending a bit on how we count, playing on the idea of a woman who is not 'fair' as in 'light coloured of hair and eyes and skin tone' being beautiful to him.
Where the argument takes something of a dive though is in context, in insistence, and in depth.
Context is something I refer to often in this podcast: these sonnets are clearly not isolated instances. There are through lines, clusters, firmly tied couples. Very clearly and very obviously the sonnets relate to each other and within their constellations form specific thematic groups. Sonnet 147, with its closing couplet is unmistakably woven into the group generally known as the Dark Lady Sonnets and this shows an uncommon insistence that the mistress is not only unorthodox in her beauty and attractiveness to our poet, but also deeply flawed in her character. This goes way beyond ordinary poetry practice and experimentation with a format. It goes into an almost unfathomable depth of self-disgust and revulsion.
All of this is still possible as an exercise in abstract character making of a playwright who finds himself at leisure to practise his craft when not writing or working on one of the 39 plays he is either credited or associated with, acting in them, travelling with them, helping to run his theatre company and 'commuting' – I use the term here with a healthy pinch of salt, of course – between his family home in Stratford-upon-Avon and his London digs, or writing long narrative poems for immediate publication.
How likely though is it? And these sonnets aren't even designed to be popular. They do not fall within the parameters of a fashion for Petrarchan love poems, they settle far outwith; they are not prepared for publication until long after the trend has passed, and even then they fail to capture the imagination of the general readership. They are personal. Private. And – I cannot imagine otherwise, not from a human and not from a professional writer perspective – impassioned.
Except, you would be right to object: this isn't a very passionate poem. It's in its own way quite formulaic. It, on its own, could quite readily be cited as an example of Shakespeare somewhat going through the motions. And that would be hard to deny. Sonnet 147 is in fact something of an exception. It stands not alone, but in a small selection of sonnets scattered throughout the series, of which we, quite in contrast to the vast majority, may justly feel inclined to say: this leaves me fairly cold. And I confess, by comparison it does. But to deduce from the exception a rule is not the same as to mistake an exception for the rule. Taking this sonnet as strong evidence, let alone proof, that Shakespeare with his series is mainly just doing what poets of ambition do at the time, albeit in his own idiosyncratic way, would, to my mind, be a grave mistake.
And the level of idiosyncrasy – if that is what we then still want to call it – is actually in itself indicative of just how far he takes his individual, for which read personal, approach:
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
On no level and in no universe familiar to us is this flattering. If William Shakespeare with the addressee of this sonnet is creating a character purely in his mind, then his mind is still as troubled by an imagination as his heart would be if the person were real. He still gives himself, his potential reader or listener, and therefore down the generations us, a figure that is deeply disturbing.
So what? you may ask: he gives us deeply disturbing characters in his plays, and we still, perhaps against our will, love them. And therein perhaps lies the key. This character, if she is made up, is not really lovable. Not to us, and not, by the sounds of it even really to Will. William Shakespeare, master inventor, imaginer, and imparter of the human condition, no matter what it entail, who can make us care for his Iago as much as for his Othello, his Harry as much as his Falstaff, his Richard II easily as much as his Henry Bolingbroke, he could make us care for his mistress if she were but a character. We care for Cleopatra, Juliet, Lady Macbeth. We care for Gertrude, perfectly problematic as she is, and we obviously care for Rosalind. We love them all, in spite of, in fact even for, all their flaws.
My contention is that if William Shakespeare with his sonnets were inventing characters for an audience, even a small, 'private' one as in a circle of friends or noblemen, his dramatist would take over and make us love them, if necessary in spite of ourselves. But loving them is difficult enough with the Fair Youth, who, for all his beauty and occasional signs of tenderness and vulnerability overall comes across as something of a spoilt, self-obsessed, petulant brat. With the Dark Lady, it's even harder, because her redeeming features, apart from the magnetic force she exercises on our poet and her unconventional but nonetheless apparently compelling beauty, are thin on the ground. And neither this sonnet, nor any of the previous ones, nor any of the ones that now follow really makes any attempt at convincing us otherwise.
Is this our 'proof' then, that the Dark Lady is real? There is no proof, that's something we've long since acknowledged. It is, however, I maintain, a powerful indication indeed. There are now only five sonnets left that either directly address this woman or talk about her. And like so many of these sonnets, they still serve to reveal much, though like so many of these poems, mostly not about the object of love, but about our poet himself...
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.
In Sonnet 119, William Shakespeare asked himself:
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted
In the distraction of this madding fever.
And, having experienced such 'evils' as those he subjected himself to, comes to the conclusion:
So I return rebuked to my content
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.
Whether with this he was referring to his relationship with the Dark Lady – possibly among others – we don't know, but what comes across strongly in this disconcertingly simple and straightforward poem is the unease he finds himself in for still, after all, desiring his mistress. This is not ordinary sonneteering.
Peter Ackroyd in his generally excellent and thoroughly researched biography of Shakespeare, when it comes to the Sonnets communicates a tangible discomfort with the idea that they could be directly related to William Shakespeare's own experience and goes to some considerable length to position them effectively as exercises in poetry, as a highly competitive man's efforts to outdo his contemporaries in wit and verbal dexterity at the height of the sonnet fashion, as anything other than a man working through his own emotional turmoil:
"Instead of speculating about the personages addressed, it is more appropriate to speculate about the speaker. In the only sense that matters, Shakespeare addresses the sonnets to himself. His muse here is midwife, rather than mother."
And as we shall see, especially as we look at the last remaining few sonnets in the Dark Lady section of the collection, he does actually have a point. Although he, somewhat reluctantly, also allows:
"It would be wrong to argue, of course, that the plethora of outside parallels means that there is no parallel at all. It is certainly possible that elements of Shakespeare's emotional life entered the poems just as they entered the plays." (Shakespeare, The Biography, 291)
In broad terms, it is, as we have noted and discussed before at some length a stance that was taken by scholars particularly during the second half of the 20th century in the wake of French deconstructionist philosophy having established itself as a primary force in literary analysis, and that I, as you will know if you've been following this podcast, consider to be, again in broad terms, simplistic, ill-founded, and improbable. You'll hear me talk about this in the episodes on Sonnet 104 and the special on The Fair Youth, if you're interested.
Sonnet 147 is a particularly interesting case in this debate of 'autobiography' vs 'abstraction from real life'. On the one hand it follows a well-trodden path: my desire is a disease – an addiction really – it is bad for me but I just can't help feeling and feeding it even though I know it makes me only ever more sick in this sense. This would shore up the argument that the sonnet may just be Shakespeare toying with one of the sonneteer's stock themes.
Also just about conceivable is the possibility that William Shakespeare simply invented a black haired, black eyed, darker skinned mistress to juxtapose her with his 'Fair Youth', and here enjoys for the third or fourth time, depending a bit on how we count, playing on the idea of a woman who is not 'fair' as in 'light coloured of hair and eyes and skin tone' being beautiful to him.
Where the argument takes something of a dive though is in context, in insistence, and in depth.
Context is something I refer to often in this podcast: these sonnets are clearly not isolated instances. There are through lines, clusters, firmly tied couples. Very clearly and very obviously the sonnets relate to each other and within their constellations form specific thematic groups. Sonnet 147, with its closing couplet is unmistakably woven into the group generally known as the Dark Lady Sonnets and this shows an uncommon insistence that the mistress is not only unorthodox in her beauty and attractiveness to our poet, but also deeply flawed in her character. This goes way beyond ordinary poetry practice and experimentation with a format. It goes into an almost unfathomable depth of self-disgust and revulsion.
All of this is still possible as an exercise in abstract character making of a playwright who finds himself at leisure to practise his craft when not writing or working on one of the 39 plays he is either credited or associated with, acting in them, travelling with them, helping to run his theatre company and 'commuting' – I use the term here with a healthy pinch of salt, of course – between his family home in Stratford-upon-Avon and his London digs, or writing long narrative poems for immediate publication.
How likely though is it? And these sonnets aren't even designed to be popular. They do not fall within the parameters of a fashion for Petrarchan love poems, they settle far outwith; they are not prepared for publication until long after the trend has passed, and even then they fail to capture the imagination of the general readership. They are personal. Private. And – I cannot imagine otherwise, not from a human and not from a professional writer perspective – impassioned.
Except, you would be right to object: this isn't a very passionate poem. It's in its own way quite formulaic. It, on its own, could quite readily be cited as an example of Shakespeare somewhat going through the motions. And that would be hard to deny. Sonnet 147 is in fact something of an exception. It stands not alone, but in a small selection of sonnets scattered throughout the series, of which we, quite in contrast to the vast majority, may justly feel inclined to say: this leaves me fairly cold. And I confess, by comparison it does. But to deduce from the exception a rule is not the same as to mistake an exception for the rule. Taking this sonnet as strong evidence, let alone proof, that Shakespeare with his series is mainly just doing what poets of ambition do at the time, albeit in his own idiosyncratic way, would, to my mind, be a grave mistake.
And the level of idiosyncrasy – if that is what we then still want to call it – is actually in itself indicative of just how far he takes his individual, for which read personal, approach:
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
On no level and in no universe familiar to us is this flattering. If William Shakespeare with the addressee of this sonnet is creating a character purely in his mind, then his mind is still as troubled by an imagination as his heart would be if the person were real. He still gives himself, his potential reader or listener, and therefore down the generations us, a figure that is deeply disturbing.
So what? you may ask: he gives us deeply disturbing characters in his plays, and we still, perhaps against our will, love them. And therein perhaps lies the key. This character, if she is made up, is not really lovable. Not to us, and not, by the sounds of it even really to Will. William Shakespeare, master inventor, imaginer, and imparter of the human condition, no matter what it entail, who can make us care for his Iago as much as for his Othello, his Harry as much as his Falstaff, his Richard II easily as much as his Henry Bolingbroke, he could make us care for his mistress if she were but a character. We care for Cleopatra, Juliet, Lady Macbeth. We care for Gertrude, perfectly problematic as she is, and we obviously care for Rosalind. We love them all, in spite of, in fact even for, all their flaws.
My contention is that if William Shakespeare with his sonnets were inventing characters for an audience, even a small, 'private' one as in a circle of friends or noblemen, his dramatist would take over and make us love them, if necessary in spite of ourselves. But loving them is difficult enough with the Fair Youth, who, for all his beauty and occasional signs of tenderness and vulnerability overall comes across as something of a spoilt, self-obsessed, petulant brat. With the Dark Lady, it's even harder, because her redeeming features, apart from the magnetic force she exercises on our poet and her unconventional but nonetheless apparently compelling beauty, are thin on the ground. And neither this sonnet, nor any of the previous ones, nor any of the ones that now follow really makes any attempt at convincing us otherwise.
Is this our 'proof' then, that the Dark Lady is real? There is no proof, that's something we've long since acknowledged. It is, however, I maintain, a powerful indication indeed. There are now only five sonnets left that either directly address this woman or talk about her. And like so many of these sonnets, they still serve to reveal much, though like so many of these poems, mostly not about the object of love, but about our poet himself...
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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!