In Sonnet 146, arguably Shakespeare’s most directly
Christian work, there is an absence of God. Although
the poem is clearly in the religious tradition of the
struggle between the pleasures of this life and the hap-
piness of the next, this theological and philosophical
difference separates this late Renaissance poem from
other body/soul debates. Still, in many ways, the poem
seems like a prayer, albeit one in which the speaker
attempts to fortify his soul at the expense of the body,
bringing him closer to God. In this case, the soul acts
as an intermediary with God in that it can establish
terms to save itself.
See also SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS (OVERVIEW).
Michael Peterson
Shakespeare’s sonnets: Sonnet 147 (“My love
is as a fever, longing still”) WILLIAM SHAKE-
SPEARE (1599) One of the darkest among the later
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s SONNETs, the speaker in Sonnet
147 proceeds through simile, proverbs, paradox, and
inversions to utterly condemn the corruption of his
beloved and, coincidentally, his own fevered, fervently
positive previous estimation of her.
The fi rst three QUATRAINs describe the speaker’s LOVE-
SICKNESS—passionate feelings of love as disease, a fever
that the physician, Reason, has tried to treat appropri-
ately. The sufferer has rejected Reason’s treatments, pre-
ferring to dwell on love, and has been abandoned by
Reason. With Reason gone, the patient is past cure and
can anticipate only death. As he lies raving, he unex-
pectedly addresses the woman he has lavished his love
on, in an APOSTROPHE declaring that all his past praise for
her has been wrong; the one he has sworn to be beauti-
ful, true, and honest he now admits is evil and ugly.
In the fi rst line, a simile, “love is as a fever,” sets the
dramatic situation. The speaker’s love affects him as
sickness, but he would prefer to remain sick (“longing
still / For that which longer nurseth the disease,” ll. 1–
2) than to take his medicine. Before this context is
established by means of the simile, the fi rst two words,
My love, could refer to the woman who has inspired
the passion, even though they clearly denote the infat-
uation, or passion of love in context. This ambivalence
thickens the poetic texture and makes the COUPLET’s
apostrophe more shocking. Nurseth can mean to feed,
as a mother nurses her child, or it can mean to care for
or attend to, the action of a patient’s nurse. The second
meaning is the expected one—a fever sufferer needs
nursing. Because the disease is being nursed, not the
patient, clearly the speaker wants to evoke the “Feed-
ing” that appears as the fi rst word in line three. Much
of the meaning is carried by paradoxes, as when the
speaker wants to preserve the disease, not his health (l.
3) and please the “uncertain, sickly appetite” (l. 4).
“Appetite” can refer to “love” or “disease”; in either
case, it has a pejorative connotation because this is not
a healthy love to begin with.
In Renaissance medicine, disease was treated most
often by application of opposites. Thus, fever was
treated with cold and by abstinence from solid food
because its nature was hot and dry. The speaker longs
for whatever might sustain the fever, not what would
break it.
The second quatrain introduces the speaker’s reason
as the physician who can ameliorate the condition.
Reason was traditionally placed in opposition to pas-
sion; reason was supposed to rule the character. Here,
because “his prescriptions are not kept” (l. 6), Reason
has abandoned the patient altogether. Lines 7 and 8
have many possible nuances of meaning, although the
general sense remains consistent: Without Reason, the
speaker comes to know that the only outcome for
unreasonable desire is death. “Approve” (l. 7) can mean
“test” or “prove” by experience; it can also carry its
modern meaning of “endorse” or “commend.” “[That]
which physic did except” can refer either to the patient
having refused (excepted) medical treatment (physic),
or to the fact that medicine would (if utilized) destroy
desire. The antecedent can be either death or desire.
As a way of underscoring the intentional ambiva-
lence and multivalence, the poet inverts a popular
proverb in the start of the third quatrain. The proverb
is “past cure past care”; by inserting “now reason is,”
the poet gives a specifi c, delimiting cause for being
past cure. The sufferer is “past cure” because Reason
has stopped caring, has abandoned him for refusing
Reason’s prescriptions. This leads toward the couplet:
“And frantic-mad with evermore unrest” (l. 10), both
completes the situation in line 9 and prepares for the
thoughts in line 11. Most modern editions end line 10SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS: SONNET 147 399