Sonnet 153: Cupid Laid by His Brand and Fell Asleep
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Cupid laid by his brand and fell asleep;
A maid of Dian's this advantage found, And his love-kindling fire did quickly steep In a cold valley fountain of that ground, Which borrowed from this holy fire of love A dateless lively heat still to endure, And grew a seething bath, which yet men prove Against strange maladies a sovereign cure. But at my mistress' eye love's brand new fired, The boy for trial needs would touch my breast, I, sick withal, the help of bath desired, And thither hied, a sad distempered guest, But found no cure; the bath for my help lies Where Cupid got new fire: my mistress' eyes. |
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Cupid laid by his brand and fell asleep;
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Cupid, who in the next sonnet will be referred to as "the little love god," put down his torch and fell asleep, presumably, as is implied in a moment, in a mythical mountain grove where there be gods and goddesses.
A 'brand' here is a torch, and in the context of Cupid it is known as the Torch of Hymen, Hymen being the god of marriage ceremonies. It is the means by which Cupid sets fire to people's hearts so they fall in love. In classical representations, Cupid often has this torch rather than – as we mostly know him equipped today – a bow and arrow, and editors generally point out that in this as in the poem that follows, this hot, fiery object also has a fairly obvious phallic connotation. |
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A maid of Dian's this advantage found,
And his love-kindling fire did quickly steep In a cold valley fountain of that ground, |
One of Diana's virginal nymphs found this opportune situation and picked up the torch, which is used to kindle love fires, and quickly dipped it in a cold valley fountain nearby.
Diana is the moon goddess, the goddess of hunters and wildlife, and also of childbirth and indeed chastity. In Roman mythology she herself is a virgin and attended by similarly chaste nymphs. Picking up on the possibly phallic allusion of the torch, Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition of the Sonnets considers that, "cold valley-fountain suggests both one of the cool springs associated with the goddess Diana and the female genitals in which the hot male member seeks to be cooled or quenched." This is far less far-fetched than at first it may sound. The example she gives for reference is from Shakespeare's own wildly successful narrative poem Venus and Adonis, in which the goddess says to the young mortal: Graze on my lips and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. PRONUNCIATION: Note that fire here is pronounced as one syllable. |
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Which borrowed from this holy fire of love
A dateless lively heat still to endure, |
The cool valley fountain now immediately took from this sacred love torch an eternal, lively or vivid heat which, being eternal, would continue to last forever.
PRONUNCIATION: Note that here as above, fire is pronounced as one syllable. |
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And grew a seething bath, which yet men prove
Against strange maladies a sovereign cure, |
And it, the fountain, turned into a hot bath which still to this day men find to be a principal or major cure against strange or exotic diseases.
Editors are of a mind that these 'strange maladies' sound very much like venereal ones. Hot baths or 'sweating baths' were commonly used to help ease those, but communal hot baths were also of course the place where sexual encounters could and would happen and where therefore venereal diseases would be also contracted. Syphilis, often referred to as 'the pox' features heavily both as a literal and as a metaphorical reference to a curse or affliction in the poetry and plays of the day, and it was also quite generally known as the 'French disease', France, in the days before trains, planes, and automobiles, and long before the Channel Tunnel, being a distant and therefore genuinely 'strange' place to most people in England. PRONUNCIATION: Note that sovereign here is pronounced as two syllables: [sov-reign] |
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But at my mistress' eye love's brand new fired,
The boy for trial needs would touch my breast, |
In a classical Petrarchan volta, the story now takes a new turn as the poet's mistress comes into play, and she does so, it appears, herself as an agent of love not merely an object thereof:
Through the glance of my mistress's eye this love torch of Cupid's was newly lit – or inflamed – and so he, the boy god Cupid, to test whether it was still working had to touch my heart with it. In the understanding of the day, the eyes sent beams out to the objects they looked upon, rather than receiving light from them. We've encountered this for example in Sonnet 114, where Shakespeare wonders whether his eye turns objects that "to his beams assemble" into perfect versions of themselves, through the alchemy taught him – he being it, the eye – by his young man's love. 'Touch' may here as elsewhere in Shakespeare carry a sense of 'infect', which in fact is reinforced by the love sickness that ensues in the following line. All of this, incidentally, to a literal-minded reader or listener suggests that the nymph, after trying to extinguish the torch and with it accidentally creating a thermal bath, placed it back by Cupid's side, but we are here very much in the realm of metaphor, with both the torch and the spring possibly standing in for sexual organs, so we should probably not attempt to read this too literally... |
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I, sick withal, the help of bath desired,
And thither hied, a sad distempered guest, |
And so I, now sick with this love that Cupid ignited in me, desired the help of a healing bath and hurried there, as a sad and diseased, or sadly diseased, visitor.
'Distempered' here means physically out of sorts, because the four classical humours – which we found elaborated in Sonnets 44 & 45 – that need to be kept in balance for a healthy disposition are now, with the intervention of love, unbalanced, and so the poet's 'temperament' is out of kilter. |
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But found no cure; the bath for my help lies
Where Cupid got new fire: my mistress' eyes. |
But I found no cure there. Instead, the bath that can or does help me lies elsewhere, namely in the place from which Cupid received his new fire, which is my mistress's eyes, as it is they that reignited his torch.
The Quarto Edition here has 'eye' instead of 'eyes', which creates an imperfect rhyme, and most editors emend this, assuming it to be a mistake. This is sound judgment, since apart from those instances where we today don't have a perfect rhyme because we pronounce words differently to the way they were pronounced in Shakespeare's day – something we discuss in detail of course with Professor David Crystal in our special episode on Original Pronunciation, OP – William Shakespeare does not really allow for bad rhyming in these sonnets. Katherine Duncan-Jones is the outlier here in her Arden edition where she retains the singular 'eye', giving several reasons for doing so, of which the most compelling is that, "in its singular form only it suggests an allusion to what Chaucer called the 'nether ye'," which he does in The Miller's Tale of his Canterbury Tales, where 'ye' indeed stands for 'eye'. The problem with this is mainly that he actually refers to Absolon in the dark of the night kissing not the mouth of the carpenter's wife, but her backside, and so while the Oxford English Dictionary definition 20 of 'eye' as "a hole or aperture" there does apply, it is really the wrong aperture that is being referred to in this particular context... PRONUNCIATION: Note that here, again, fire is pronounced as one syllable. |
Sonnet 153 is the first of two poems that round off the collection, both retelling the same story of a tired love god Cupid who falls asleep, having put down his torch beside him. This is taken up by a nymph who dips it in a cool fountain or well with the intention of 'disarming' Cupid, but the flame of the torch is so intense that it turns the pool into a hot bath where ever since men who are sick can go to find relief.
The source of both this and the following poem is patently the same and universally acknowledged to be an epigram by Marianus Scholasticus, a Greek poet who flourished in the early 6th century in the Middle East, possibly Palestine and/or Syria. The six-line poem is contained in the Greek Anthology, a collection of writings from the classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature and roughly translates as:
Beneath these plane trees, Love lay detained by gentle slumber, having put his torch in the care of the Nymphs, but the Nymphs said to each other: "What are we waiting for? With this we could quench the fire in the hearts of men." But the torch set fire even to the water, and the Love Nymphs have filled the bath with hot water ever since.
While we don't know how or when William Shakespeare first got hold of this, there are any number of ways in which either the Greek original text or a translation of it into English or Latin could have crossed his path, possibly, as has been suggested, as early as his school days, and the overlap with his poems is so close that we need not doubt this having served as his inspiration.
Shakespeare departs from the original in two significant ways, and he does so in both these sonnets, which therefore appear to be a typical case of imitatio, the classical rhetorical exercise of copying and paraphrasing an existing text to practise style and expression. Firstly, rather than have Cupid put his torch in the care of the nymphs, in both Sonnet 153 and 154, one of the nymphs effectively appropriates it. In other words, he doesn't trust the nymph – the virgin – with his burning torch, the nymph – the virgin – just simply steals it, which sets quite a different framework. And, secondly, in both poems he introduces his mistress as a reason for seeking out the bath so inadvertently created by the nymph, but finding no cure there, though with different outcomes and conclusions, as we shall see.
The presence of these two poems here at the end of the collection at first glance puzzles. Although they both mention 'my mistress', they both no longer convince as poems written specifically about The Dark Lady, or any other identifiable character. They are both so rooted in classical allegory, and therefore so generic in what they express – even if there are some fairly obvious and therefore most likely deliberate sexual overtones – that they live entirely in a category of their own, a category whose function to us is not immediately clear. Until we look at other sonnet series of the period and realise: Shakespeare is following an established pattern.
Samuel Daniel, whom we've mentioned on a number of occasions with his cycle Delia, in 1592 – so around about the time, or even possibly just before the time Shakespeare is thought to start composing his series – publishes 50 sonnets that are followed in his collection by a short anacreontic ode, which in turn is followed by a longer poem in rhyme royal called The Complaint of Rosamond, whereby both 'anacreontic' and 'royal' are simply verse forms that are distinct both from the sonnet form and from each other, which to explain here in detail would probably go too far.
One year later, in 1593, a poet named Thomas Lodge publishes a collection entitled Phillis that contains a two-part sonnet sequence – remember that William Shakespeare's sonnet sequence falls broadly into two parts – followed by an in this case trochaic ode – trochaic being another poetic meter – followed by a poem called The Tragical Complaint of Elstred. Several others adopt the same pattern: a sonnet sequence, followed by a short poetic interlude with a change in style and tone, followed by a longer 'complaint'. And what follows these two sonnets in the 1609 collection: a longer poem called A Lover's Complaint, composed in rhyme royal.
As John Kerrigan in the Penguin edition of the Sonnets observes: "When those first Jacobean readers opened Shakespeare's volume in 1609, they found something perfectly familiar." A three-partite structure in which these last two sonnets do not so much belong to the body of the series but act as a bridge between the sonnets 'proper', so to speak, and the concluding complaint that acts effectively as an epilogue to the collection but is very much integral to it.
The question then is not so much, why are there unusual sonnets here at the end of the series, but why did Shakespeare elect to have here two sonnets, rather than a poem of its own kind, why did he choose these particular ones and what, if anything, does Sonnet 153 specifically tell us about either William Shakespeare, or his mistress, or about his sonneteering in general?
The answer, as so very often when it comes to William Shakespeare and to these sonnets is, yet again, we really don't know. Anything we are about to say amounts to speculation, starting with the choice of these two poems. Shakespeare could easily have worked the established conceit into a separate poetic rendition, be that now anacreontic or trochaic, or anything else, but he elected to stick with the form of the sonnet, making his bridge thus stand apart not for the form but for the style and the subject matter and, significantly for its repetition.
Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells in their reshuffled edition of the Sonnets, which we discussed on this podcast, taking up the possibility that Shakespeare may have come upon the original source text as early as his school days and rating them as poetically inferior to the rest, place these two poems at the very beginning of their volume, curiously in the reverse order, putting 154 ahead of 153, arguing that they must be the writing exercises of a teenage Shakespeare, possibly under the watchful eye of a teacher, and insisting that 153 is an improvement on what they judge to be the weaker Sonnet 154.
All of this, while not impossible, is pure conjecture, of course, and there is absolutely no proof of any of it being the case whatsoever. It is just as possible that Shakespeare composed these two sonnets at any other time in his life, including, for example, the moment when he curated the collection, something Edmondson Wells also say they believe he did himself, though without acknowledging that this in turn would imply that he did so with an intention of 154 following 153, as opposed to the other way round.
We still don't know, of course, whether he actually did curate the collection, but much of what we've seen and discussed points towards this, not least the very deliberate inclusion and placement of these two poems in itself. And if that is the case, if William Shakespeare himself did put the collection together – and irrespective of whether he wanted it published at that particular time – then that means he must have actively selected the theme of Cupid and his love torch, and consciously duplicated it, or consciously chosen an already duplicated version of it, if it was pre-existing.
Which pushes forward the second question: why did he do so? The central rhetorical argument that Sonnet 153 makes is that if we take the myth of Cupid with his extinguished torch, then I, the poet, because of my mistress, find no cure in this supposedly healing bath created by the nymphs. Whereby it is worth noting that the original makes no mention of the bath being intended for men to go there and cure their maladies there. That being as it may, introducing the mistress ties the sonnet directly to the poems about his mistress and creates a first strong link to the previous 23 sonnets, not counting Sonnet 145 which most people accept to be about his wife Anne, rather than the Dark Lady.
Sonnet 153 – and this distinguishes it from the last poem, Sonnet 154 – then declares that a remedial bath for the poet lies in his mistress's eye, which is also where Cupid's torch got its new flame from. This would suggest that the mistress reignites the fire of love in William Shakespeare, which she does, as she must, through the love god Cupid, and it allows for the mistress herself to be the remedy for this new burning love.
So far, so good, and so clear. The final note is a positive one towards the mistress: my love, or my lust, can be eased when I'm with her. Sonnet 153 thus could be said to constitute something of a happy ending. After all the ups and downs, after the doubts, the self-disgust, the excessive punning, after all the I-must-love-you-in-spite-of-myself-and-you're-not-that-beautiful-you-know-and-why-did-you-have-to-steal-my-young-man-from-me-ness of the nearly two dozen sonnets that went before, this poem is now simply concluding: I'm all right when I'm with her.
The case, here, for an allusion to venereal disease and healing baths, is weak. In fact, it more or less dissipates, since Shakespeare seeking, let alone finding, cure for an infection from the person who gave it to him – or, as is also possible of course, lest we forget, gave it to – makes no real sense. This crucial twist though, as we shall see very soon when we look at Sonnet 154, is there absent, which will not just allow for, but invite, a more subtextual reading of that poem than this one, and therein, as we shall also examine, may lie a clue.
And what, if anything does this say about our Will? That question is almost impossible to answer. Does he, with Sonnet 153, want us to believe that his desire for his mistress is undiminished? Is this, as has been suggested, an expression of disappointment and disillusionment that he can't keep away from her even though she makes him 'sick', again be that now love sick or in fact physically ill? Is it all far less meaningful than we think it may be and does he really just grab a couple of poems here to create his required bridge for The Lover's Complaint at the end without giving any great thought to what these particular verses say about him or his mistress?
We don't know. That he needed a bridge to give his collection a structure similar enough to the one established by his contemporaries seems virtually beyond doubt. That he would simply rifle through his old box of sonnets and pick out a couple he composed some 25 years earlier sounds a great deal less convincing. That there is some code, some double or triple meaning, in these lines that is now lost to and on us is – considering his predilection for puns and layered meanings – if not highly then certainly quite likely.
And perhaps that's what we need to leave it at and be content that we can only know so much. Our approach, after all, has been and is, and shall continue to be to the end, to go by what the words themselves tell us. And if William Shakespeare had wanted us to know more, we can fairly safely assume, he would have given us more. Now, though, there is only one more sonnet, and it is to this almost, but not quite, identical, but there is yet one more compartment to this treasure trove, and that may yet yield some more insight, when we get to it, which will of course be after the last sonnet: A Lover's Complaint...
The source of both this and the following poem is patently the same and universally acknowledged to be an epigram by Marianus Scholasticus, a Greek poet who flourished in the early 6th century in the Middle East, possibly Palestine and/or Syria. The six-line poem is contained in the Greek Anthology, a collection of writings from the classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature and roughly translates as:
Beneath these plane trees, Love lay detained by gentle slumber, having put his torch in the care of the Nymphs, but the Nymphs said to each other: "What are we waiting for? With this we could quench the fire in the hearts of men." But the torch set fire even to the water, and the Love Nymphs have filled the bath with hot water ever since.
While we don't know how or when William Shakespeare first got hold of this, there are any number of ways in which either the Greek original text or a translation of it into English or Latin could have crossed his path, possibly, as has been suggested, as early as his school days, and the overlap with his poems is so close that we need not doubt this having served as his inspiration.
Shakespeare departs from the original in two significant ways, and he does so in both these sonnets, which therefore appear to be a typical case of imitatio, the classical rhetorical exercise of copying and paraphrasing an existing text to practise style and expression. Firstly, rather than have Cupid put his torch in the care of the nymphs, in both Sonnet 153 and 154, one of the nymphs effectively appropriates it. In other words, he doesn't trust the nymph – the virgin – with his burning torch, the nymph – the virgin – just simply steals it, which sets quite a different framework. And, secondly, in both poems he introduces his mistress as a reason for seeking out the bath so inadvertently created by the nymph, but finding no cure there, though with different outcomes and conclusions, as we shall see.
The presence of these two poems here at the end of the collection at first glance puzzles. Although they both mention 'my mistress', they both no longer convince as poems written specifically about The Dark Lady, or any other identifiable character. They are both so rooted in classical allegory, and therefore so generic in what they express – even if there are some fairly obvious and therefore most likely deliberate sexual overtones – that they live entirely in a category of their own, a category whose function to us is not immediately clear. Until we look at other sonnet series of the period and realise: Shakespeare is following an established pattern.
Samuel Daniel, whom we've mentioned on a number of occasions with his cycle Delia, in 1592 – so around about the time, or even possibly just before the time Shakespeare is thought to start composing his series – publishes 50 sonnets that are followed in his collection by a short anacreontic ode, which in turn is followed by a longer poem in rhyme royal called The Complaint of Rosamond, whereby both 'anacreontic' and 'royal' are simply verse forms that are distinct both from the sonnet form and from each other, which to explain here in detail would probably go too far.
One year later, in 1593, a poet named Thomas Lodge publishes a collection entitled Phillis that contains a two-part sonnet sequence – remember that William Shakespeare's sonnet sequence falls broadly into two parts – followed by an in this case trochaic ode – trochaic being another poetic meter – followed by a poem called The Tragical Complaint of Elstred. Several others adopt the same pattern: a sonnet sequence, followed by a short poetic interlude with a change in style and tone, followed by a longer 'complaint'. And what follows these two sonnets in the 1609 collection: a longer poem called A Lover's Complaint, composed in rhyme royal.
As John Kerrigan in the Penguin edition of the Sonnets observes: "When those first Jacobean readers opened Shakespeare's volume in 1609, they found something perfectly familiar." A three-partite structure in which these last two sonnets do not so much belong to the body of the series but act as a bridge between the sonnets 'proper', so to speak, and the concluding complaint that acts effectively as an epilogue to the collection but is very much integral to it.
The question then is not so much, why are there unusual sonnets here at the end of the series, but why did Shakespeare elect to have here two sonnets, rather than a poem of its own kind, why did he choose these particular ones and what, if anything, does Sonnet 153 specifically tell us about either William Shakespeare, or his mistress, or about his sonneteering in general?
The answer, as so very often when it comes to William Shakespeare and to these sonnets is, yet again, we really don't know. Anything we are about to say amounts to speculation, starting with the choice of these two poems. Shakespeare could easily have worked the established conceit into a separate poetic rendition, be that now anacreontic or trochaic, or anything else, but he elected to stick with the form of the sonnet, making his bridge thus stand apart not for the form but for the style and the subject matter and, significantly for its repetition.
Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells in their reshuffled edition of the Sonnets, which we discussed on this podcast, taking up the possibility that Shakespeare may have come upon the original source text as early as his school days and rating them as poetically inferior to the rest, place these two poems at the very beginning of their volume, curiously in the reverse order, putting 154 ahead of 153, arguing that they must be the writing exercises of a teenage Shakespeare, possibly under the watchful eye of a teacher, and insisting that 153 is an improvement on what they judge to be the weaker Sonnet 154.
All of this, while not impossible, is pure conjecture, of course, and there is absolutely no proof of any of it being the case whatsoever. It is just as possible that Shakespeare composed these two sonnets at any other time in his life, including, for example, the moment when he curated the collection, something Edmondson Wells also say they believe he did himself, though without acknowledging that this in turn would imply that he did so with an intention of 154 following 153, as opposed to the other way round.
We still don't know, of course, whether he actually did curate the collection, but much of what we've seen and discussed points towards this, not least the very deliberate inclusion and placement of these two poems in itself. And if that is the case, if William Shakespeare himself did put the collection together – and irrespective of whether he wanted it published at that particular time – then that means he must have actively selected the theme of Cupid and his love torch, and consciously duplicated it, or consciously chosen an already duplicated version of it, if it was pre-existing.
Which pushes forward the second question: why did he do so? The central rhetorical argument that Sonnet 153 makes is that if we take the myth of Cupid with his extinguished torch, then I, the poet, because of my mistress, find no cure in this supposedly healing bath created by the nymphs. Whereby it is worth noting that the original makes no mention of the bath being intended for men to go there and cure their maladies there. That being as it may, introducing the mistress ties the sonnet directly to the poems about his mistress and creates a first strong link to the previous 23 sonnets, not counting Sonnet 145 which most people accept to be about his wife Anne, rather than the Dark Lady.
Sonnet 153 – and this distinguishes it from the last poem, Sonnet 154 – then declares that a remedial bath for the poet lies in his mistress's eye, which is also where Cupid's torch got its new flame from. This would suggest that the mistress reignites the fire of love in William Shakespeare, which she does, as she must, through the love god Cupid, and it allows for the mistress herself to be the remedy for this new burning love.
So far, so good, and so clear. The final note is a positive one towards the mistress: my love, or my lust, can be eased when I'm with her. Sonnet 153 thus could be said to constitute something of a happy ending. After all the ups and downs, after the doubts, the self-disgust, the excessive punning, after all the I-must-love-you-in-spite-of-myself-and-you're-not-that-beautiful-you-know-and-why-did-you-have-to-steal-my-young-man-from-me-ness of the nearly two dozen sonnets that went before, this poem is now simply concluding: I'm all right when I'm with her.
The case, here, for an allusion to venereal disease and healing baths, is weak. In fact, it more or less dissipates, since Shakespeare seeking, let alone finding, cure for an infection from the person who gave it to him – or, as is also possible of course, lest we forget, gave it to – makes no real sense. This crucial twist though, as we shall see very soon when we look at Sonnet 154, is there absent, which will not just allow for, but invite, a more subtextual reading of that poem than this one, and therein, as we shall also examine, may lie a clue.
And what, if anything does this say about our Will? That question is almost impossible to answer. Does he, with Sonnet 153, want us to believe that his desire for his mistress is undiminished? Is this, as has been suggested, an expression of disappointment and disillusionment that he can't keep away from her even though she makes him 'sick', again be that now love sick or in fact physically ill? Is it all far less meaningful than we think it may be and does he really just grab a couple of poems here to create his required bridge for The Lover's Complaint at the end without giving any great thought to what these particular verses say about him or his mistress?
We don't know. That he needed a bridge to give his collection a structure similar enough to the one established by his contemporaries seems virtually beyond doubt. That he would simply rifle through his old box of sonnets and pick out a couple he composed some 25 years earlier sounds a great deal less convincing. That there is some code, some double or triple meaning, in these lines that is now lost to and on us is – considering his predilection for puns and layered meanings – if not highly then certainly quite likely.
And perhaps that's what we need to leave it at and be content that we can only know so much. Our approach, after all, has been and is, and shall continue to be to the end, to go by what the words themselves tell us. And if William Shakespeare had wanted us to know more, we can fairly safely assume, he would have given us more. Now, though, there is only one more sonnet, and it is to this almost, but not quite, identical, but there is yet one more compartment to this treasure trove, and that may yet yield some more insight, when we get to it, which will of course be after the last sonnet: A Lover's Complaint...
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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!