By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took’: in Sonnet 47, Shakespeare concludes his pair of sonnets about the ‘war’ between his eye and his heart, that had been introduced in the previous sonnet. In Sonnet 47, the war has ended in a truce, and Shakespeare’s eye and heart now live in ‘league’ with each other, doing good turns for the other. This turnaround is going to require a little closer analysis:
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ In other words, what if the world ended tonight – what, then, would be the fate of my immortal soul? This is the matter that John Donne considers in this, one of his holy sonnets. As ever with Donne, his language and imagery require a bit of careful unpacking and close analysis, but the meaning of his poem can be ascertained by going through this powerful sonnet.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Shakespeare and the number 46 have a curious relationship. The theory that the Bard translated the 46th Psalm in the King James Version of the Bible (because Shakespeare would have been 46 when work on the translation was nearing its completion, and the 46th word of the psalm is … Read more
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
As the opening line of this poem, ‘The other two, slight air and purging fire’, makes clear, Sonnet 45 is very much the companion-piece to Sonnet 44, which had pondered Shakespeare’s separation from the Fair Youth by drawing on two of the four classical elements, earth and water. In Sonnet 45, he turns to ‘the other two’, air and fire:
The other two, slight air and purging fire,
Are both with thee, wherever I abide;
The first my thought, the other my desire,
These present-absent with swift motion slide.
For when these quicker elements are gone
In tender embassy of love to thee,
My life, being made of four, with two alone
Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy;
Until life’s composition be recured
By those swift messengers return’d from thee,
Who even but now come back again, assured
Of thy fair health, recounting it to me:
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, / Injurious distance should not stop my way’: yes, sonnet 44 in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is another poem about the long-distance love Shakespeare bears the Fair Youth. This sonnet generally requires less critical analysis than most of the Sonnets, but nevertheless a few words of summary and explication help to show how Shakespeare’s poem uses the scientific ideas of his age to highlight the plight of the long-distance lover.
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.