Sonnet 154: The Little Love-God, Lying Once Asleep
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The little love-god, lying once asleep,
Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand, Whilst many nymphs that vowed chaste life to keep Came tripping by, but in her maiden hand, The fairest votary took up that fire, Which many legions of true hearts had warmed, And so the general of hot desire Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed. This brand she quenched in a cool well by, Which from love's fire took heat perpetual, Growing a bath and healthful remedy For men diseased, but I, my mistress' thrall, Came there for cure, and this by that I prove: Love's fire heats water, water cools not love. |
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The little love-god, lying once asleep,
Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand, |
The little love-god who is, as in the previous sonnet, Cupid, while once upon a time lying asleep, put down by his side his torch, which is what he uses to ignite the fire of love in the hearts of people.
Keen-eyed editors have observed that Cupid, while lying asleep, could scarcely lay his torch by his side by way of active decision, and note in this an allusion, perhaps, to what Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden edition of the Sonnets calls "involuntary detumescence." As with Sonnet 153, these suggestions of sexual references or instances of innuendo are not entirely spurious. Both these sonnets are awash with – in places subtle, in places not so subtle – sexual imagery and allusions and it is perfectly possible, nay likely, that Shakespeare here in fact builds on the playfulness set up with Sonnet 153 and raises the sexual stakes, as it were. 'Brand', as in the previous poem, means torch, and here carries the same potentially phallic connotation as there. What is also possible of course is that Shakespeare simply doesn't care too much about the logic of this in any case highly metaphorical situation and means to say that 'lying once asleep', Cupid had laid his torch by his side: grammar, as we have seen throughout this exploration, at the time is nowhere near as strictly applied as we would possibly expect today; something the following line in fact also illustrates: |
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Whilst many nymphs that vowed chaste life to keep
Came tripping by, |
When a group of nymphs who had vowed to keep or lead a chaste life happened to pass.
That these are the nymphs of Diana, the named goddess of the previous sonnet, is here merely implied, but would be obvious to the classically educated reader or listener of the time who would readily associate nymphs who vow chastity with the goddess of chastity. 'Tripping' is a verb Shakespeare uses sparingly and mostly reserves for spirits or mythological figures in his plays: it suggests a light-footed, near-dancing gait that barely touches the ground. |
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but in her maiden hand,
The fairest votary took up that fire, Which many legions of true hearts had warmed, |
But the most beautiful of these votaries with her virginal hand picked up that torch of Cupid's which had warmed, as in administered the fire of love to, many legions of true hearts.
Shakespeare here making a point of the hand that picks up this torch being that of a virgin is probably significant, as it would appear to underline once more the sexual connotation of this sonnet. A 'votary' is a person "who has made vows of dedication to religious service" (Oxford Languages) and 'many legions' suggests an enormously large number on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, introduces a military imagery that immediately is taken up in the next line: |
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And so the general of hot desire
Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed. |
And so Cupid, who with his 'many legions of true hearts' is thus the 'commander in chief', so to speak 'of hot desire' was disarmed by a virgin hand while he was asleep.
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This brand she quenched in a cool well by,
Which from love's fire took heat perpetual, |
This torch of Cupid's she, the nymph, put out in a cool well nearby, and this well took from the love-fire of the torch an eternal heat...
Much as in Sonnet 153, the nymph tries to extinguish the torch in a cool pool of water – there a fountain, here a well – but the heat of the torch is so intense that the well now turns into a hot spring forever. PRONUNCIATION: Note that quenched here is pronounced as two syllables: [quen-ched]. |
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Growing a bath and healthful remedy
For men diseased, |
...and so the cool well is turned into a healing bath that provides therapeutic remedy for men who are diseased.
Although ostensibly the 'disease' here referred to is unspecified and in the context of Cupid and Diana's nymphs most obviously implies a general love sickness, this once more alludes to the healing baths of the era which offered a common treatment for venereal disease. |
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but I, my mistress' thrall,
Came there for cure, and this by that I prove: |
But I, who I am enthralled to my mistress – her slave, her bondman: a common trope for the lover who is devoted to his mistress – came here to this bath to find a cure for my sickness or disease, and by doing so I can testify, or I am a living proof who can bear witness to the following:
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Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.
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The fire of love can heat up water, but water cannot cool down or extinguish the fire of love.
Editors tend to concur that two entirely distinct references may here be deliberately combined and alluded to. On the one hand, the suggestion that desire is so strong that nothing can cool it down, in fact the cool pool of a virgin's well will turn into a hot bath through the fire of a lover's torch, with many a suggestive pun intended and more than a hint towards the ever-present risk of infection with a sexually transmitted disease which even a healing hot bath cannot ease the pain of. On the other hand – and a contemporary reader or listener would surely enjoy the vast range of this dynamic – a more or less direct nod to The Bible with Song of Solomon 8, Verses 6 and 7: "...for love is strong as death: jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are fiery coals, and a vehement flame. Much water cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man should give all the substance of his house for love, they would greatly contemn it." And thus, on both a bawdy and a noble, a dejected and an elated note, the series ends with the Latin word, in capital letters followed by a full stop: FINIS. |
Sonnet 154 brings to a close William Shakespeare's collection of sonnets, and it does so hand-in-hand with Sonnet 153, of which it is not a continuation, but a reiteration.
Like Sonnet 153, the poem borrows directly from an epigram by 6th century Greek poet Marianus Scholasticus, and tells the story of Cupid who falls asleep in a mountain grove with his Torch of Hymen by his side. One of the goddess Diana's nymphs – in this version the most beautiful of them all – takes the torch and attempts to extinguish it in a nearby well, and in doing so inadvertently creates a hot bath for eternity.
In both versions by William Shakespeare, this becomes a place where men may go to find relief for their sickness or disease, whereby neither of the two sonnets specifies just exactly what kind of disease may be so cured and leaves it somewhat open to interpretation whether Shakespeare means merely the affliction of a love sickness, or whether he is also alluding, as is widely believed, to venereal diseases, most particularly syphilis, for which hot baths were considered to be a remedial measure, if not exactly a cure, at the time.
The principal point on which Sonnet 154 differs from Sonnet 153 is in its conclusion, which – and in this too it diverges from the previous poem – comes much later in the sonnet.
Sonnet 153 follows the classical Petrarchan tradition, with the octave – the first two quatrains or two times four lines – setting out the story, and a volta that comes with the sestet – the third quatrain together with the closing couplet – that turns around the argument and brings it to its resolution.
The turning point is the introduction of the poet's mistress to the story who in Sonnet 153 reignites Cupid's torch; Cupid, in order to test it, touches the poet's heart with it, and he, now newly ablaze with the fire of love, seeks the remedy of the bath created by the nymphs, but to no avail. Instead, the bath for his kind of sickness lies, so the sonnet declares, in the place which gave new fire to Cupid's torch, namely the mistress's eye or eyes, whereby it is possible, though not certain, that with 'eye' here Shakespeare has a rather different organ of his mistress's in mind than that with which she sees.
In this we found, when discussing it in our last episode, something of a happy ending: a resolution to the story and therefore to the series that saw William Shakespeare as the love-sick poet finding relief and comfort with his mistress.
Sonnet 154 does something very different. It keeps the main narrative going right through the last of the three quatrains until, in the middle of the last line of the body of the sonnet Shakespeare does the equivalent of poetic handbrake turn and places there, just before the closing couplet, a midline volta with what we might call a medial or caesural enjambment: he ties his entirely new thought into the closing couplet to dramatic effect.
In doing so, he condenses four lines in Sonnet 153 into one line of text across two lines of verse and then leads into his new conclusion with "and this by that I prove:" this new conclusion not being that the bath for his sickness lies with his mistress, but far more generally and categorically that:
Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.
Whichever way we are inclined to read this now – whether with an allusion to the unpleasantness, even danger, of a venereal disease, or simply as a fairly fundamental realisation that time and again desire drives us to return to whatever happens to be our remedial pool – what this sonnet declares is that we shall never be entirely cured of this condition. An ailment that turns us into fools whose eyes do not see the world for what it is, whose judgement is impaired, and whose reason, which, to paraphrase Sonnet 147, would act as "the physician to [our] love" simply abandons us and leaves us to this "fever, longing still | for that which longer nurseth the disease."
"Love's fire heats water, water cools not love." — It is, despite its categorical tone, an understated finale, this, and really neither happy nor sad. It comes across as a near laconic accommodation with the way things are and postulates, if anything: thus they shall ever be.
If we assume – as I believe and concur with others we can – that William Shakespeare himself curated his collection of 154 sonnets, then we must assume that he had a curatorial effect in mind with placing Sonnets 153 and 154 here at the end in this order.
As we mentioned when looking at Sonnet 153, there are scholars who argue that Sonnet 154 was composed before Sonnet 153 and that Sonnet 153 be an improvement on 154. Not only have we no proof of this, as we also noted, but it would be rather adventurous to suggest that William Shakespeare here, in his placing of these two sonnets with each other, made a mistake and accidentally put his 'weaker' sonnet last. Even if – and we really don't know this to be the case – he did write these two sonnets, as has also been suggested, very early on in his life, and even if he did so with Sonnet 154 first and Sonnet 153 second, they find themselves in the Quarto Edition in a sequence that absolutely makes sense and that allows for a progression from a more 'personal', 'specific' rendition of a generic text, relating it thus more closely to his own experience with his mistress, to a more 'global', 'universally applicable' one that makes a statement about the world of lovers at large.
We also discussed at greater length than is here therefore necessary the function that these two sonnets jointly fulfil: they create a deliberately distinct bridge from the body of the sonnets to the piece which actually then completes the collection: A Lover's Complaint. With this structure overall, William Shakespeare – or, if he did not put together the collection, then whoever did do so – follows the fashion of the 1590s for sonnet series that conclude with a complaint, whereby these two elements, the sonnets and the complaint, are connected with a short segment in a different style and/or meter, sometimes, but not always or necessarily, as an anacreontic, a short verse on the theme of love and wine.
Interestingly, this particular purpose, which these two sonnets serve as a pair, both supports and undermines the contention that Shakespeare himself put together the collection for publication.
What speaks in favour is that they clearly constitute a choice: there is no way that accident or error could have placed these two sonnets here at the end back to back: it speaks of a conscious mind doing so, and it also speaks of an authoritative mind doing so, since they really can be said to create a caesura. Even though they are formally sonnets, they, especially taken together as a duplication of the one epigram, form a unit that is categorically different to the sonnets of the body of the collection and thus can readily be accepted as a not quite anacreontic but perhaps pseudo-anacreontic interlude, since they are neither kept in the anacreontic meter, nor do they concern themselves, as strictly speaking an anacreontic poem should, with love and wine, but merely with love. And at least the two poems could both be argued to be a tad frivolous, as an anacreontic also should be.
What speaks against Shakespeare being the curator is that it could reasonably be argued that a man of Shakespeare's calibre would find the time and inclination to write a short piece like the one required here in its own meter and style. Being Shakespeare, he would, be able to turn out a quick anacreontic quite perfectly before breakfast, even after a heavy night's drinking, we should think. Or an ode, for that matter, or virtually any other style he thought appropriate. Which does allow for the possibility that whoever did put together the collection, not having access to any other of Shakespeare's writings nor to the man himself, simply dipped into the bundle of manuscripts and picked out these two sonnets, saying to themselves, these will do.
It isn't a particularly likely scenario, this, but it is a possible one, and it invites one more question which we have not really pursued, nor will be able to pursue in great detail now, but which it is worth at least raising here, before we bid our sonnets farewell: this act of curation, this deliberate ordering of these sonnets into a Procreation Sequence, a large Fair Youth segment, a much shorter Dark Lady segment, to be followed by two sonnets that don't really fit anywhere but also fit perfectly just as and where they are: did this leave out anything? And if so what?
We know of course that Shakespeare also wrote sonnets for some of his plays, but could either Shakespeare or someone on his behalf, or someone without his permission have chosen from many more sonnets that we don't now know about? Were these two, Sonnet 153 and 154 the only ones left over, or was there a raft of old sonnets by Shakespeare to choose from to place here as the bridge to A Lover's Complaint?
The question is obviously unanswerable and important mostly with regard to the question, who did this? Because if it was Shakespeare, we can assume that he wanted these sonnets here and nothing else. That if, as far as he was concerned, they did not fulfil his purpose, he would not have chosen them, or composed them, but done something different. In other words: the choice is apt.
If it wasn't Shakespeare, then their inclusion is either exceptionally fortuitous because these were the only two left over and they just happen to fit rather well, and there are two of them, and they do just what is required of them; or it was exceptionally diligent, because there were several, even many to choose from but the person collating them decided that these two would do the job rather well, and so it turns out to be. And that could only really be achieved by someone who knows these sonnets extremely well, who understands them, and who wishes the collection in published form to do its poet justice.
And we realise, even these two modest simple poems, that seem to be doing nothing much beyond tell an old tale of the little love-god Cupid and some virginal nymph of Diane's, actually are not at all trivial. They signal purpose and intent and competence, in other words: authority. And so although we don't and may never know whether or not this sonnet sequence – and I here now use the word 'sequence' once more advisedly and consciously – is in its order authorial, we know for absolutely certain that it is intentional, deliberate, and, perhaps most important of all should we ever feel tempted to doubt it, let alone mess with it, authoritative. And that means it is thus, to all intents and purposes, definitive and just right.
Like Sonnet 153, the poem borrows directly from an epigram by 6th century Greek poet Marianus Scholasticus, and tells the story of Cupid who falls asleep in a mountain grove with his Torch of Hymen by his side. One of the goddess Diana's nymphs – in this version the most beautiful of them all – takes the torch and attempts to extinguish it in a nearby well, and in doing so inadvertently creates a hot bath for eternity.
In both versions by William Shakespeare, this becomes a place where men may go to find relief for their sickness or disease, whereby neither of the two sonnets specifies just exactly what kind of disease may be so cured and leaves it somewhat open to interpretation whether Shakespeare means merely the affliction of a love sickness, or whether he is also alluding, as is widely believed, to venereal diseases, most particularly syphilis, for which hot baths were considered to be a remedial measure, if not exactly a cure, at the time.
The principal point on which Sonnet 154 differs from Sonnet 153 is in its conclusion, which – and in this too it diverges from the previous poem – comes much later in the sonnet.
Sonnet 153 follows the classical Petrarchan tradition, with the octave – the first two quatrains or two times four lines – setting out the story, and a volta that comes with the sestet – the third quatrain together with the closing couplet – that turns around the argument and brings it to its resolution.
The turning point is the introduction of the poet's mistress to the story who in Sonnet 153 reignites Cupid's torch; Cupid, in order to test it, touches the poet's heart with it, and he, now newly ablaze with the fire of love, seeks the remedy of the bath created by the nymphs, but to no avail. Instead, the bath for his kind of sickness lies, so the sonnet declares, in the place which gave new fire to Cupid's torch, namely the mistress's eye or eyes, whereby it is possible, though not certain, that with 'eye' here Shakespeare has a rather different organ of his mistress's in mind than that with which she sees.
In this we found, when discussing it in our last episode, something of a happy ending: a resolution to the story and therefore to the series that saw William Shakespeare as the love-sick poet finding relief and comfort with his mistress.
Sonnet 154 does something very different. It keeps the main narrative going right through the last of the three quatrains until, in the middle of the last line of the body of the sonnet Shakespeare does the equivalent of poetic handbrake turn and places there, just before the closing couplet, a midline volta with what we might call a medial or caesural enjambment: he ties his entirely new thought into the closing couplet to dramatic effect.
In doing so, he condenses four lines in Sonnet 153 into one line of text across two lines of verse and then leads into his new conclusion with "and this by that I prove:" this new conclusion not being that the bath for his sickness lies with his mistress, but far more generally and categorically that:
Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.
Whichever way we are inclined to read this now – whether with an allusion to the unpleasantness, even danger, of a venereal disease, or simply as a fairly fundamental realisation that time and again desire drives us to return to whatever happens to be our remedial pool – what this sonnet declares is that we shall never be entirely cured of this condition. An ailment that turns us into fools whose eyes do not see the world for what it is, whose judgement is impaired, and whose reason, which, to paraphrase Sonnet 147, would act as "the physician to [our] love" simply abandons us and leaves us to this "fever, longing still | for that which longer nurseth the disease."
"Love's fire heats water, water cools not love." — It is, despite its categorical tone, an understated finale, this, and really neither happy nor sad. It comes across as a near laconic accommodation with the way things are and postulates, if anything: thus they shall ever be.
If we assume – as I believe and concur with others we can – that William Shakespeare himself curated his collection of 154 sonnets, then we must assume that he had a curatorial effect in mind with placing Sonnets 153 and 154 here at the end in this order.
As we mentioned when looking at Sonnet 153, there are scholars who argue that Sonnet 154 was composed before Sonnet 153 and that Sonnet 153 be an improvement on 154. Not only have we no proof of this, as we also noted, but it would be rather adventurous to suggest that William Shakespeare here, in his placing of these two sonnets with each other, made a mistake and accidentally put his 'weaker' sonnet last. Even if – and we really don't know this to be the case – he did write these two sonnets, as has also been suggested, very early on in his life, and even if he did so with Sonnet 154 first and Sonnet 153 second, they find themselves in the Quarto Edition in a sequence that absolutely makes sense and that allows for a progression from a more 'personal', 'specific' rendition of a generic text, relating it thus more closely to his own experience with his mistress, to a more 'global', 'universally applicable' one that makes a statement about the world of lovers at large.
We also discussed at greater length than is here therefore necessary the function that these two sonnets jointly fulfil: they create a deliberately distinct bridge from the body of the sonnets to the piece which actually then completes the collection: A Lover's Complaint. With this structure overall, William Shakespeare – or, if he did not put together the collection, then whoever did do so – follows the fashion of the 1590s for sonnet series that conclude with a complaint, whereby these two elements, the sonnets and the complaint, are connected with a short segment in a different style and/or meter, sometimes, but not always or necessarily, as an anacreontic, a short verse on the theme of love and wine.
Interestingly, this particular purpose, which these two sonnets serve as a pair, both supports and undermines the contention that Shakespeare himself put together the collection for publication.
What speaks in favour is that they clearly constitute a choice: there is no way that accident or error could have placed these two sonnets here at the end back to back: it speaks of a conscious mind doing so, and it also speaks of an authoritative mind doing so, since they really can be said to create a caesura. Even though they are formally sonnets, they, especially taken together as a duplication of the one epigram, form a unit that is categorically different to the sonnets of the body of the collection and thus can readily be accepted as a not quite anacreontic but perhaps pseudo-anacreontic interlude, since they are neither kept in the anacreontic meter, nor do they concern themselves, as strictly speaking an anacreontic poem should, with love and wine, but merely with love. And at least the two poems could both be argued to be a tad frivolous, as an anacreontic also should be.
What speaks against Shakespeare being the curator is that it could reasonably be argued that a man of Shakespeare's calibre would find the time and inclination to write a short piece like the one required here in its own meter and style. Being Shakespeare, he would, be able to turn out a quick anacreontic quite perfectly before breakfast, even after a heavy night's drinking, we should think. Or an ode, for that matter, or virtually any other style he thought appropriate. Which does allow for the possibility that whoever did put together the collection, not having access to any other of Shakespeare's writings nor to the man himself, simply dipped into the bundle of manuscripts and picked out these two sonnets, saying to themselves, these will do.
It isn't a particularly likely scenario, this, but it is a possible one, and it invites one more question which we have not really pursued, nor will be able to pursue in great detail now, but which it is worth at least raising here, before we bid our sonnets farewell: this act of curation, this deliberate ordering of these sonnets into a Procreation Sequence, a large Fair Youth segment, a much shorter Dark Lady segment, to be followed by two sonnets that don't really fit anywhere but also fit perfectly just as and where they are: did this leave out anything? And if so what?
We know of course that Shakespeare also wrote sonnets for some of his plays, but could either Shakespeare or someone on his behalf, or someone without his permission have chosen from many more sonnets that we don't now know about? Were these two, Sonnet 153 and 154 the only ones left over, or was there a raft of old sonnets by Shakespeare to choose from to place here as the bridge to A Lover's Complaint?
The question is obviously unanswerable and important mostly with regard to the question, who did this? Because if it was Shakespeare, we can assume that he wanted these sonnets here and nothing else. That if, as far as he was concerned, they did not fulfil his purpose, he would not have chosen them, or composed them, but done something different. In other words: the choice is apt.
If it wasn't Shakespeare, then their inclusion is either exceptionally fortuitous because these were the only two left over and they just happen to fit rather well, and there are two of them, and they do just what is required of them; or it was exceptionally diligent, because there were several, even many to choose from but the person collating them decided that these two would do the job rather well, and so it turns out to be. And that could only really be achieved by someone who knows these sonnets extremely well, who understands them, and who wishes the collection in published form to do its poet justice.
And we realise, even these two modest simple poems, that seem to be doing nothing much beyond tell an old tale of the little love-god Cupid and some virginal nymph of Diane's, actually are not at all trivial. They signal purpose and intent and competence, in other words: authority. And so although we don't and may never know whether or not this sonnet sequence – and I here now use the word 'sequence' once more advisedly and consciously – is in its order authorial, we know for absolutely certain that it is intentional, deliberate, and, perhaps most important of all should we ever feel tempted to doubt it, let alone mess with it, authoritative. And that means it is thus, to all intents and purposes, definitive and just right.
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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!