Sonnet 147 Flashcards
Composer
William Shakespeare
Contextual ideas about male love
Men should love moderately and temperately
What kind of love is it centred around?
Mania
Mania (love)
Human reason is overpowered by potent emotions
Lost reason to love - in control of his personal autonomy.
‘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 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’
- The speaker declares that his love (sexual passion/infatuation) is like a feverish disease (apt simile), that has robbed him of his human ability to act rationally.
- Despite being fully aware that he is sick and mad, he cannot help but long for more.
- His love - fever traps him in a destructive cycle, where indulging in his desires might briefly satisfy his longing, but after a short time, the longing would return.
- His love and longing are thus inseperable, like a snake eating its own tail.
Alliteration
- Alliterating the ‘L’ sound in line 1 makes the connection between the two clear.
- Past cure I am, now reason is past care” (line 9)
The repeated “p” and “c” sounds in past cure and past care emphasize the idea that the speaker’s love has reached an incurable stage. The alliteration strengthens the despairing tone, showing that even reason has abandoned him.
Meter
Iambic pentameter
Allusion
The poem subverts the common Elizabethan advice to “starve a fever and feed a cold”. In failing to ‘starve’ his fever (refrain from indulgence) he keeps himself sick.
Trochee examples
Line 3 - Feeding on that…..
This metrical variation is purposed to surprise the reader, emphasizing the eager destructiveness of the speaker’s love disease.
Sibilance
“The uncertain sickly appetite to please”
A repetition of the ‘s’ sound (hissing) perhaps suggests saliva, white the t and p sounds have a sharp biting quality that evokes insatiable hunger.
Lines 5-7
‘My reason
Gender (construct)
Gender is a binary construct, with masculinity pertaining to superior physical and mental power, rationality.
The speaker is positioned as a more feminine man, an opposition to the male archetype, by letting his emotions control reason.
Thus, the poem is cautionary regarding the dangers of love.
My thoughts and discourse as madmen’s are.
Shows the fragmentation of his thoughts and discourse. Shakespeare deliberately places the verb at the end of the sentence to affirm the readers understanding of the madness (through his inability to form coherent sentences).
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.
Sickly appetite acts as a metaphor to describe speakers lust/love. The sickness of love - like a sick person describing his condition (quatrain 1), followed by the doctors’ orders in the subsequent quatrain.
My reason, the physician to my love.
Line 5 personifies the speakers reason as a doctor, offering prescriptions to aid the speakers love ‘disease’, attempting in vain to aid the speaker to overcome his illness. This is a component of the central extended metaphor that compares love to a disease, and thus, the speaker acknowledges that he is powerless.
