Sonnet 148: O Me! What Eyes Hath Love Put in My Head
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O me! What eyes hath love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight, Or if they have, where is my judgement fled That censures falsely what they see aright? If that be fair whereon my false eyes dote, What means the world to say it is not so? If it be not, then love doth well denote Love's eye is not so true as all men's: no, How can it? O how can love's eye be true, That is so vexed with watching and with tears? No marvel then, though I mistake my view, The sun itself sees not till heaven clears. O cunning love, with tears thou keepst me blind, Lest eyes well seeing thy foul faults should find. |
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O me! What eyes hath love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight, |
Oh me! What kind of eyes are these that love has put in my head, which do not show me anything resembling a true vision.
The expression 'O me!' is similar to our 'oh me, oh my', of course, or 'my oh my', though both have perhaps a slightly quaint ring to them in today's language. Interesting about it is that this is one of few instances in which the Quarto Edition actually features an exclamation mark. The Quarto is no reliable guide to what punctuation, if any, Shakespeare himself uses in his manuscript, but he and his typesetters deploy this one especially sparingly, and that somewhat emphasises the suggested connotation here of 'poor me!' that comes with this opening salvo. Editors generally believe that 'love' in this case may specifically mean Cupid, who is often depicted as wearing a blindfold and so randomly shoots his darts into the hearts of lovers. Some correspondingly capitalise 'Love' to make this obvious, but Shakespeare is just as likely to play on the triple meaning of 'love' and allow for all three elements to contribute to his deficient sight: love as the emotion, which distorts what it sees; love as the object of love, here the mistress, of whom we know that to our poet she seems 'fair' or beautiful even though everybody else sees that she is in fact 'dark' and not, apparently, all that gorgeous; and indeed Love as in the little love god who will be subject of the final two sonnets in the collection very soon. So, steering ourselves to just one particular meaning of the word would therefore appear to be both a little reductive and also unnecessary. |
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Or if they have, where is my judgement fled
That censures falsely what they see aright? |
Or if my eyes do in fact provide a reliable vision and thus have 'correspondence with true sight', then whatever happened to my judgement that it should assess so wrongly what the eyes see correctly.
'Censure' here mainly means to judge or to consider, but the negative connotation that we today associate with the word is already beginning to shine through, since the vision in this scenario is judged to be false even though it is actually true. |
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If that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,
What means the world to say it is not so? |
If it is the case that that which my eyes dote on is actually beautiful, then how come the world at large, meaning everybody else, says it is not so?
There is a glitch in our Will's reasoning here, and not for the first time. We have on one or two occasions noted that logic is not his strongest suit, and here he slightly trips up: the eyes are established in this poem to give a 'false' vision when they interpret the person they are looking at as 'beautiful' or 'fair' even though she is not. If she actually is beautiful, then either the eyes are not 'false', because they really see accurately and deliver correct information to the brain, or they now suddenly deny her being 'fair' and see her as the opposite, which would be ugly. But there is no indication of the eyes seeing her in this way here falsely. In fact the closing couplet similarly suggests that 'eyes well seeing' would be able to identify her faults, rather than the other way round: false seeing eyes agreeing with the world that the mistress is not 'fair'. Unless Shakespeare here draws a direct line here back to the last line of Sonnet 147 in which he concluded that the mistress is "as black as hell, as dark as night." This, if "that be fair whereon my false eyes dote" then would turn out to be 'false' and so the eyes seeing her so could be said to be 'false' too. But that does not strictly make sense either, since these eyes 'dote' and, as we saw in Sonnet 141, this "implies an uncritical love that is possibly excessive and unreasonable, even foolish," as I put it there. Interestingly, in both Sonnet 141 and Sonnet 131 it is Shakespeare's heart that dotes, rather than the eyes. And in Sonnet 141 it does so even though he finds himself moved to admit: In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, For they in thee a thousand errors note; All of which mostly goes to show and underline: reason and logic and true vision and a sober assessment of the situation all go out of the window where love is concerned... |
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If it be not, then love doth well denote
Love's eye is not so true as all men's: no, |
If on the other hand it is not the case that the object my eyes dote on is 'fair' or 'beautiful', then love itself illustrates or demonstrates that the eye of love – meaning a lover's eye or the eye that is afflicted by love, perhaps as by the 'fever' described in the previous sonnet – does not show things in the same 'real' way as the eye of everybody else who is not in love, or at least not in love with the same person.
The final 'no' at the end of this line offers a minor conundrum. The Quarto Edition punctuates a colon to introduce it and follows it with a comma, which ties it to the next line and makes the sentence read, as here, 'love's eye is not as true as everybody else's: no, how can it be? Some editors though – notably John Kerrigan in the Penguin Edition of the Sonnets – detect in 'eye' a pun on 'aye' and then read the line as saying: the 'aye' or 'yes' of love – presumably to you, the object of my love and your 'beauty', is not as true or accurate as everybody else's 'no', which they implicitly say to you by negating your 'beauty'. This may just be a little far-fetched, but we know how much Shakespeare enjoys his puns and his layerings, and so it certainly can't be ruled out either, as an intended secondary meaning. |
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How can it? O how can love's eye be true,
That is so vexed with watching and with tears? |
How can it? How can love's eye be true, as in see 'aright' or correctly, when it is so troubled both with sleeplessness and with tears?
'Watch' here suggests being kept awake by 'watchfulness', for which read worry, implied is about your whereabouts or your conduct. We have come across this before in Sonnet 61, where Shakespeare says to his young man: For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, From me far off, with others all too near. This would also to some extent at least explain the tears, and it ties into what other sonnets have told us about the Dark Lady as Shakespeare's mistress: not only does she have other lovers and quite possibly a husband, she has also manifestly seduced, or at any rate had sexual relations with, or at the very least pursued the intention of having sex with, his young male lover. Though there may, of course, also be other reasons for our poet's pain and sorrow, as we shall explore in a little more detail in a moment. To 'vex' meanwhile, as in Sonnets 92 and 135, means to worry or to trouble, rather than to irritate or anger as we might today understand it. |
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No marvel then, though I mistake my view,
The sun itself sees not till heaven clears. |
It is no wonder then that I cannot see properly and that I mistake what I see for something else: after all the sun itself cannot see clearly now until the rain has gone, to somewhat paraphrase Johnny Nash, a little short of four hundred years later.
The idea of the sun being the eye of heaven also is not new to us, the famous Sonnet 18 already invoked it with: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, and of course this heavenly eye can't see the world while clouds are in the sky obscuring its view, and rain – as heaven's tears – pours down on us. |
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O cunning love, with tears thou keepst me blind,
Lest eyes well seeing thy foul faults should find. |
O crafty or ingenious love, you keep me blind with tears so that my eyes, which otherwise would see properly, cannot detect your ugly or despicable deficiencies.
Here again, as in the opening line, 'love' comes to mean three things at once. At first glance it seems Shakespeare is now talking to, rather than about, love, the emotion, or possibly the love god Cupid, but in the last line we realise he is talking to his mistress directly now, calling her 'love', while at the same time ascribing to her 'foul faults', which apart from delivering a gratifying alliteration also echoes the conclusion of the previous sonnet and once more suggests that this woman, whom I love in spite of myself and against my better judgment, is not only not classically beautiful, but also possessed of deep character flaws. 'Cunning' as often in Shakespeare – we came across it in Sonnet 24, for example – and as generally the case at the time means 'skilful' or 'artful', without necessarily needing to imply deceit, though in this context here it actually helps deliver the notion that our lover is indeed being deceived, both by his mistress, and through her also by his eyes... |
In Sonnet 148, William Shakespeare develops the themes revisited with Sonnet 147 and further elaborates on his realisation that reason has abandoned him and he is therefore incapable of judging properly what he sees. Either that, or his eyes themselves are faulty, since they seem to distort what they are looking at. The conclusion he comes to, much in line with the previous sonnet, is that his defective vision stems from his love for his mistress, but he here adds the almost 'technical' but for this not at all inconsequential detail that his eyes couldn't possibly be expected to deliver a true picture to the brain of what they see, since their vision is blurred by tears, suggesting therefore that this love he feels for his mistress is tinged with sadness, sorrow, and/or pain.
Sonnet 148 gives us scant indication of what causes these tears that turn into its dominant subject with the volta, the turnaround in the poem that here comes appropriately with the sestet or the third quatrain, following the octave of the first couple of quatrains, just as in a traditional sonnet it should. Up until then we are led to believe that this whole issue our poet is experiencing with his eyesight principally has to do with a form of 'madness' or 'fever': what in our last episode we ventured resembled our notion today of an addiction, caused by love. This, as an explanation, would suffice. Everybody knows since time immemorial that 'love is blind' and also that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'. These two simple metaphorical facts are borne out by experience the world over on a daily basis and always have been. Reason, we noted it earlier in this episode and we noted it before, where love is concerned has no role to play and abandons us, perhaps quite rightly too.
This interplay between the mind – reason, clear thinking, the work done by the brain – and the eye, the organ that does the seeing without any analytical faculty of its own, is a recurring theme in the Renaissance poetry of the time. It draws on the classical, Aristotelian and scholastic tradition that the eye is the noblest of senses but subject to ratio or reason. Sonnets 24, 46 & 47, 113, and 114 all deal with the relationship between eye and mind or eye and heart in one way or another, whereby mind and heart, as we have also noted before, are closely linked to each other in Shakespeare.
Sonnet 24 declares:
Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;
but arrives at the conclusion that no matter how much the eye gazes on you, it cannot actually see what is truly going on within you:
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art:
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.
Sonnets 46 & 47 describe a 'legal' battle between eye and heart. This, with the help of a panel of thoughts, which are however, as they would be in the prevailing perception at the time, all "tenants to the heart," is resolved in a 'league' or settlement that allocates to the eyes the young lover's outward appearance and to the heart of the poet the lover's "inward love of heart."
Sonnet 113 then takes the argument to a next level at which, the poet being absent from the lover, the eye now resides in the mind and turns everything it sees into a vision of the young man. This is 'resolved', if that's still the right word to use then, in Sonnet 114 with an acceptance and acknowledgment that really the eye flatters the mind by turning everything it sees into something beautiful, and the mind willingly 'drinks up' this cup which may or may not be 'poisoned', because it has, after all, been 'tasted' and therefore tested by the eye itself which loves the person it is seeing just as much as the mind, for which here also again read heart.
All of this really just to remind ourselves of the elaborate play on the concepts of vision, reason, the mind, and the heart that Shakespeare has set as precedents in the context of love, and always, in these instances, in relation to his younger male lover, the Fair Youth, of whom everyone agrees, quite in contrast to his mistress, the Dark Lady, that he is the veritable embodiment of beauty.
In relation to the Dark Lady, the discrepancy between what the world thinks beautiful and what our poet sees in her has been a near permanent theme right from the start of the section with Sonnet 127. And with Sonnet 137 he then for the first time formulates in these concrete terms that his eyes are not reliable:
Thou blind fool love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold and see not what they see:
arriving at the almost resigned conclusion:
In things right true my heart and eyes have erred,
And to this false plague are they now transferred.
Sonnet 141 then again presents the eye – as indeed all the other senses – in conflict with the heart:
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.
Here, he also introduces the notion of disease and the discomfort resulting from it:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain.
And now with Sonnets 147 and 148 we return to the idea of love as a malady or a fever, to a lover abandoned by reason, and to a vision distorted by love, yes, but also, and this is the interesting and critical point: by pain.
Not every lover who dotes is in tears. Some lovers have their love requited, though maybe they don't then need to write pages and pages of poetry about this. Others find ways of expressing love in song and sonnet or other verse and moan and maybe even groan. But our Will here, as his explanation for not being able to see properly, resorts to tears, and that puts a new and potentially rather revealing angle on things. It positively characterises this love as painful, without, though, telling us why it is so.
The obvious and to all intents and purposes perfectly valid explanation is a straightforward love pain. As mentioned earlier: we know from these sonnets that the mistress in question is as unfaithful to Shakespeare as he is to her. We know she has some sort of relationship, in all likelihood sexual or sexually driven, with his young lover. If our poet is to be believed we get to understand – Sonnets 135, 136, and 138 leave us in no reasonable doubt about this – that she has a voracious sexual appetite and is correspondingly promiscuous.
What other sonnets have also suggested, though this one far less so, is that with such promiscuity comes venereal disease. This has found mention as a possibility in relation to Sonnets 94, 129, 135, 137, 141, and 144. In other words: often. And as often have we pointed out: there is good reason for this. Sexually transmitted disease, especially syphilis, but not only, in the London Shakespeare inhabits is rife.
There is no direct, obvious, reason to assume that this is what he is referring to here. There is also no obvious reason to assume that it isn't. And so we can't make any strong claim either way; what we can do is remind ourselves of this too: it has been hinted at multiple times, most often and most persistently in relation to the Dark Lady, and so there is this possibility, no more than that, of Shakespeare here alluding to tears and pain that stem from having been handed down an unpleasant infection.
What speaks for such a reference is the way in which tears and pain are being introduced here into this sonnet when they don't really need to be. What speaks against it is that this is somewhat flimsy evidence and highly conjectural.
But as we know: everything is conjecture, except the words, and the words, whatever else they do, communicate here in the sestet of this sonnet that our poet is not only blinded by love, as he has told us before, but also hurt and pained by it; that this love, for whatever reason, is causing him tears.
It is a poem of course, this, and so we may not want to take him too literally: these may 'just' be metaphorical tears, but they are there, set down in ink upon the paper that became the manuscript for these sonnets to be printed. And there are now fewer than five hundred words left that concern themselves with this mistress, the Dark Lady, and none of them will serve to mitigate or sooth that pain, though some relief, temporary as it be, is yet to come...
Sonnet 148 gives us scant indication of what causes these tears that turn into its dominant subject with the volta, the turnaround in the poem that here comes appropriately with the sestet or the third quatrain, following the octave of the first couple of quatrains, just as in a traditional sonnet it should. Up until then we are led to believe that this whole issue our poet is experiencing with his eyesight principally has to do with a form of 'madness' or 'fever': what in our last episode we ventured resembled our notion today of an addiction, caused by love. This, as an explanation, would suffice. Everybody knows since time immemorial that 'love is blind' and also that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'. These two simple metaphorical facts are borne out by experience the world over on a daily basis and always have been. Reason, we noted it earlier in this episode and we noted it before, where love is concerned has no role to play and abandons us, perhaps quite rightly too.
This interplay between the mind – reason, clear thinking, the work done by the brain – and the eye, the organ that does the seeing without any analytical faculty of its own, is a recurring theme in the Renaissance poetry of the time. It draws on the classical, Aristotelian and scholastic tradition that the eye is the noblest of senses but subject to ratio or reason. Sonnets 24, 46 & 47, 113, and 114 all deal with the relationship between eye and mind or eye and heart in one way or another, whereby mind and heart, as we have also noted before, are closely linked to each other in Shakespeare.
Sonnet 24 declares:
Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;
but arrives at the conclusion that no matter how much the eye gazes on you, it cannot actually see what is truly going on within you:
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art:
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.
Sonnets 46 & 47 describe a 'legal' battle between eye and heart. This, with the help of a panel of thoughts, which are however, as they would be in the prevailing perception at the time, all "tenants to the heart," is resolved in a 'league' or settlement that allocates to the eyes the young lover's outward appearance and to the heart of the poet the lover's "inward love of heart."
Sonnet 113 then takes the argument to a next level at which, the poet being absent from the lover, the eye now resides in the mind and turns everything it sees into a vision of the young man. This is 'resolved', if that's still the right word to use then, in Sonnet 114 with an acceptance and acknowledgment that really the eye flatters the mind by turning everything it sees into something beautiful, and the mind willingly 'drinks up' this cup which may or may not be 'poisoned', because it has, after all, been 'tasted' and therefore tested by the eye itself which loves the person it is seeing just as much as the mind, for which here also again read heart.
All of this really just to remind ourselves of the elaborate play on the concepts of vision, reason, the mind, and the heart that Shakespeare has set as precedents in the context of love, and always, in these instances, in relation to his younger male lover, the Fair Youth, of whom everyone agrees, quite in contrast to his mistress, the Dark Lady, that he is the veritable embodiment of beauty.
In relation to the Dark Lady, the discrepancy between what the world thinks beautiful and what our poet sees in her has been a near permanent theme right from the start of the section with Sonnet 127. And with Sonnet 137 he then for the first time formulates in these concrete terms that his eyes are not reliable:
Thou blind fool love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold and see not what they see:
arriving at the almost resigned conclusion:
In things right true my heart and eyes have erred,
And to this false plague are they now transferred.
Sonnet 141 then again presents the eye – as indeed all the other senses – in conflict with the heart:
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.
Here, he also introduces the notion of disease and the discomfort resulting from it:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain.
And now with Sonnets 147 and 148 we return to the idea of love as a malady or a fever, to a lover abandoned by reason, and to a vision distorted by love, yes, but also, and this is the interesting and critical point: by pain.
Not every lover who dotes is in tears. Some lovers have their love requited, though maybe they don't then need to write pages and pages of poetry about this. Others find ways of expressing love in song and sonnet or other verse and moan and maybe even groan. But our Will here, as his explanation for not being able to see properly, resorts to tears, and that puts a new and potentially rather revealing angle on things. It positively characterises this love as painful, without, though, telling us why it is so.
The obvious and to all intents and purposes perfectly valid explanation is a straightforward love pain. As mentioned earlier: we know from these sonnets that the mistress in question is as unfaithful to Shakespeare as he is to her. We know she has some sort of relationship, in all likelihood sexual or sexually driven, with his young lover. If our poet is to be believed we get to understand – Sonnets 135, 136, and 138 leave us in no reasonable doubt about this – that she has a voracious sexual appetite and is correspondingly promiscuous.
What other sonnets have also suggested, though this one far less so, is that with such promiscuity comes venereal disease. This has found mention as a possibility in relation to Sonnets 94, 129, 135, 137, 141, and 144. In other words: often. And as often have we pointed out: there is good reason for this. Sexually transmitted disease, especially syphilis, but not only, in the London Shakespeare inhabits is rife.
There is no direct, obvious, reason to assume that this is what he is referring to here. There is also no obvious reason to assume that it isn't. And so we can't make any strong claim either way; what we can do is remind ourselves of this too: it has been hinted at multiple times, most often and most persistently in relation to the Dark Lady, and so there is this possibility, no more than that, of Shakespeare here alluding to tears and pain that stem from having been handed down an unpleasant infection.
What speaks for such a reference is the way in which tears and pain are being introduced here into this sonnet when they don't really need to be. What speaks against it is that this is somewhat flimsy evidence and highly conjectural.
But as we know: everything is conjecture, except the words, and the words, whatever else they do, communicate here in the sestet of this sonnet that our poet is not only blinded by love, as he has told us before, but also hurt and pained by it; that this love, for whatever reason, is causing him tears.
It is a poem of course, this, and so we may not want to take him too literally: these may 'just' be metaphorical tears, but they are there, set down in ink upon the paper that became the manuscript for these sonnets to be printed. And there are now fewer than five hundred words left that concern themselves with this mistress, the Dark Lady, and none of them will serve to mitigate or sooth that pain, though some relief, temporary as it be, is yet to come...
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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!