Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147: My love is as a fever

Sonnet 147

William Shakespeare

Write a Critical appreciation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 147.

As we know that the great poet William Shakespeare has composed 154 sonnets in all, Sonnet 147 is one of them that falls on the sequence of those sonnets addressed to Dark Lady. Sonnet 147 is written from the perspective of a poet who regards the love he has for his mistress and lover as an illness and, more specifically, a fever.

Sonnet 147 reveals a paradox within the poet, and perhaps within the population, between desiring the exact sin or illness that makes one sick, unstable, or less fully whole as a person, and knowing what we desire, in this case the poet's mistress, is the very thing that causes the problem.

The first quatrain of the Sonnet 147 lets the reader know that the poet has been "infected," in a sense, by his mistress. While the idea of being "love-sick" has often been idealized and romanticized in modern culture, the way the poet describes his lust and desire leads to a darker reading, almost as if he is the host of some kind of sickly desired parasite feeding his senses and reason.

The poet begins the sonnet by connecting and treating love and disease as parallel and intricately connected concepts. The poet's mistress has planted in the poet a sick fever, a kind of carnal love and desire, which is causing an illness in him. His love or lust and madness are weakening him to the point where his lust has probably taken on its own kind of energy and being like a fever and is now occupying a place in his body. A never-ending cycle also appears between the first two lines.

Carl Atkins notes that, the author's yearning, still for that which feeds the chronic disease, is not lazy wordplay, but suggests the patient's sense that the condition will never end. It is also important to note that the idea that the poet would "feed" his fever was in stark contrast to that in Elizabethan England, as the wisdom at the time was to never feed a fever based on the Four Humors medical belief. The prevailing idiom and medical belief of the time was "feed a cold, starve a fever" meaning “a common cold can be squashed with adequate food intake quickly if the fever burns out quickly.”

In the second quatrain, the reason, which Shakespeare likens to the only wise "physician" or surrounding mind, is what gives him a way to cool his maddened fever. The poet's reason cannot bear the fact that the poet is so foolish and reckless with his body and mind, and abandons the poet altogether.

David West asserts that being abandoned and depressed, the poet is proving, by experience, that desire is nothing but death. A reader can assume without a doctor, because, all around, the sickness and fever that affects the poet can completely take over, leaving death as the only possible outcome. Shakespeare seems to have accepted this inevitable outcome and wrote the last line of the quatrain "Desire is death".

However, in these lines, we have the Biblical allusion with reference Romans 8:6 where the lines read “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace”. In this reference, it is to be assumed that the Dark Lady either willingly or unwilling is going to darkening the moral values of the poet’s love with her physical complexion as well as her moral lifelessness.

In the third quatrain, the poet begins to describe his decline and continued or increasing illness. The line “Past cure I am, now reason is past care," is a play on an old proverb that usually reads "'Past care, past cure'" expressing the traditional wisdom that, if a patient is incurable, care will not help him."

Many scholars have speculated on what the ‘play’ meant by the common proverb, since it is highly unlikely that Shakespeare misused a common and well-known phrase. One could read the line as a possible sign of madness as the poet says that his body is being taken over, so deranged and maddened by the fever; he cannot even use a simple proverb correctly.

Scholars WG Ingram and Theodore Redpath also suggest, "Shakespeare is not merely reproducing the proverb here ... but playing with it, for ... he here reverses it. The case is past cure, because the physician has ceased to care." More evidence to do and point to the "frantic-mad" and "random babbling" of the poet's past cures and cares, G. Blakemore Evans observes that "the poet's frenzied state of mind is illustrated by the harshly extreme complaints of his mistress in the following stanza."

Finally proceeding to the last two lines (couplet) of the Sonnet 147, the poet describes his symptoms and madness to the reader. With the beginning of the couplet, however, the tone of the sonnet changes and the poet begins to address his lady, and not as affectionately as in most sonnets.

These last lines may actually be further evidence of his madness; He swears to the woman he desires as fair and bright, but he knows that she is comparable to nothing else, only sin and uncertainty. David West observes that "madness is defined in the last two lines, and 'fair ... bright ... black ... dark' carries all the moral meaning, darkness is not simply the absence of light. It is the presence of evil."

However, Shakespearean sonnets almost always include a feature called a turn or volta. This is an important moment in the poem where the theme or tone changes suddenly and surprisingly. Here, we see the abrupt changes in line 13 of Sonnet 147, where the speaker suddenly stops describing all the symptoms of her love sickness and accuses her lover of being dishonest, unfaithful and immoral.

*****

👉 Sonnet No. 65 by William Shakespeare - Central idea and Summary

👉 Sonnet No. 116 (William Shakespeare) - definition of 'Love'

👉 Thomas Kyd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ as a revenge play

👉 The Faerie Queene - the portrayal of Good vs. Evil

👉 The Flea by John Donne as a metaphysical poem