- Shakespeare's Sonnet 147

| A brief reading | Shakespeare | Sonnet 147 | 

SONNET 147

My love is as a fever longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147, love is presented as some kind of disease that is feeding itself on the speaker’s desires. The theme represents love as an illness, the lover as the source that "nurseth the disease" and reason as a doctor (physician) to this illness. Love and reason are personified as two opposing forces creating a contrast between passion and judgment.

In the sonnet, love is illustrated as self-destructive. A fever that longs still for the source that caused it, “feeding” on it to fill its "appetite to please." The sonnet goes on to say that reason, which leads people away from the disarray of love, it is like a doctor prescribing medicine for the love fever, but it has abandoned the speaker because it has been ignored. As a consequence, death, pain and heartbreak are now inevitable. Love has eaten away slowly his sanity and he is past the point of caring: “Past cure I am, now reason is past care”. 

Interpreting the sonnet, inwardly, it can be said that the speaker has fallen in love with someone and this certain someone is “sucking” the life out of him but he can't get away from it because he loves him/her.