Sonnet 147

Question 1

Composer

Answer 1

William Shakespeare

Question 2

Contextual ideas about male love

Answer 2

Men should love moderately and temperately

Question 3

What kind of love is it centred around?

Answer 3

Mania

Question 4

Mania (love)

Answer 4

Human reason is overpowered by potent emotions
Lost reason to love - in control of his personal autonomy.

Question 5

‘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’

Answer 5

• 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.

Question 6

Alliteration

Answer 6

• 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.

Question 7

Meter

Answer 7

Iambic pentameter

Question 8

Allusion

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

Trochee examples

Answer 9

Line 3 - Feeding on that…..
This metrical variation is purposed to surprise the reader, emphasizing the eager destructiveness of the speaker’s love disease.

Question 10

Sibilance

Answer 10

“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.

Question 11

Lines 5-7

Answer 11

‘My reason

Question 12

Gender (construct)

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

My thoughts and discourse as madmen’s are.

Answer 13

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).

Question 14

Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

My reason, the physician to my love.

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

Quote from Sonnet 147: ‘My love is as a fever, longing still’

Answer 16

Analysis: Shakespeare opens with a simile that medicalises love, destabilising romantic idealism by invoking disease. The juxtaposition of “love” and “fever” suggests obsession as pathological. The semantic field of illness (“fever,” “sick,” “cure”) frames passion as corruption rather than beauty. The iambic pentameter is momentarily unsettled, echoing the fever’s disruption of order.
Context: Written during plague years, the metaphor resonates with fears of contagion. Renaissance humanism, which prized rational self-mastery, casts unchecked desire as corruptive to both body and soul.
Interpretation: The line depicts love as parasitic and self-destructive — a force that undermines health and reason, mirroring Jacobean anxieties about bodily and spiritual disorder.

Question 17

Quote from Sonnet 147: ‘Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill’

Answer 17

Analysis: Shakespeare employs paradox to depict masochistic indulgence — love sustains the very sickness it causes. The enjambment mirrors the speaker’s spiralling thoughts, while the trochaic inversion at “Feeding” disrupts rhythm, enacting disorder. The metaphor of consumption intensifies the sense of addiction.
Context: Renaissance medicine (humoral theory) held that patients craved what worsened them. Shakespeare aligns desire with this irrational craving, a kind of self-poisoning.
Interpretation: The line critiques the speaker’s inability to sever himself from destructive passion, reinforcing humanist warnings against intemperance and emotional excess.

Question 18

Quote from Sonnet 147: ‘My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are’

Answer 18

Analysis: The simile aligns the speaker’s language with madness. The syntactic inversion (“as madmen’s are”) enacts mental fragmentation, while the plosive alliteration in “madmen’s… my” underscores instability. Shakespeare blurs speech and thought, implying a collapse of both inner and outer reason.
Context: Madness in Jacobean culture was linked to sin, lust, and moral collapse. Audiences would associate this with the dangers of losing reason to passion.
Interpretation: The line dramatises the speaker’s intellectual disintegration — a philosophical warning about how erotic obsession corrupts discourse, thought, and identity.

Question 19

Quote from Sonnet 147: ‘Past cure I am, now reason is past care’

Answer 19

Analysis: The medical metaphor positions love as an incurable disease. Personification casts “reason” as a failed physician abandoning its patient. The caesura after “I am” mimics the finality of his collapse.
Context: Renaissance humanism exalted reason as the safeguard of morality. Here, its desertion reflects contemporary fears of passion overpowering intellect.
Interpretation: The speaker’s surrender to love signifies a complete breakdown of rationality, illustrating Shakespeare’s critique of unchecked desire and the fragility of human self-control.

Question 20

Quote from Sonnet 147: ‘For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night’

Answer 20

Analysis: The volta overturns idealisation into condemnation. Shakespeare juxtaposes light imagery (“bright”) with dark religious imagery (“hell,” “night”), enacting moral inversion. The antithesis between past perception and present reality highlights delusion. The heavy alliteration of “black…bright” stresses the fall.
Context: In Jacobean culture, “black” connoted sin, evil, and racialised otherness. The imagery engages post-Reformation anxieties about spiritual deception and false appearances.
Interpretation: The beloved becomes emblematic of damnation. Shakespeare critiques how erotic obsession blinds judgment, transforming desire into moral and spiritual peril.

Question 21

Quote from Sonnet 147: ‘My reason, the physician to my love’

Answer 21

Analysis: Shakespeare personifies reason as a doctor responsible for curing passion. The metaphor collapses, dramatizing reason’s impotence. The extended medical conceit running through the sonnet heightens the sense of obsession as pathological.
Context: Renaissance audiences, steeped in medical and humoral theory, would see love as destabilising both mind and body. The failure of reason reflects cultural anxieties about losing the faculty that defines humanity.
Interpretation: This line crystallises the sonnet’s central conflict — reason versus passion. Shakespeare positions love not as redemptive, but as a force that annihilates intellect.

Question 22

Quote from Sonnet 147: ‘Desire is death’ (implied through imagery and tone)

Answer 22

Analysis: Though not stated directly, Shakespeare constructs a semantic field of disease and decay — fever, infection, madness, hell — to imply that unchecked desire culminates in death. The use of extended metaphor collapses love into pathology, eroding any distinction between passion and destruction. This creates a tone of inevitability, where desire is not only dangerous but terminal.
Context: In Jacobean moral thought, excessive eros was associated with sin, damnation, and loss of reason. Shakespeare’s humanist perspective critiques the surrender of rational faculties to appetite, resonating with post-Reformation anxieties about self-governance.
Interpretation: Love, when consumed by obsession, becomes fatal. Shakespeare warns that what masquerades as devotion can in fact be moral and spiritual self-destruction.

Question 23

Quote from Sonnet 147: ‘Who art as black as hell, as dark as night’

Answer 23

Analysis: The sonnet’s closing couplet delivers a volta of condemnation, overturning earlier idealisation. Shakespeare uses simile (“as black as hell”) and binary opposition (“bright” vs. “black,” “fair” vs. “foul”) to dramatise the collapse of illusion. The cumulative effect is a complete inversion of the beloved’s image, from angelic to infernal.
Context: In Jacobean England, blackness connoted sin, corruption, and spiritual blindness, shaped by both religious symbolism and racialised associations. The line also reflects broader cultural fears of deception in love and faith, underscoring anxieties about misjudging appearances.
Interpretation: The beloved becomes emblematic of damnation itself. Shakespeare shows how obsessive passion leads to disillusionment and moral ruin, leaving the speaker not enlightened but devastated.