Sonnet 147

Sonnet 147 by William Shakespeare is an extremely interesting piece of literature. In contrast to his other sonnets, love is personified in a dark light. It is compared to a fever that feeds on its host, extending the illness that caused it. In essence, Shakespeare is saying that the very thing feeding his love will ultimately be responsible for the demise of his love. He uses the metaphor "My reason, the physician to my love" to compare his feelings of love and the rationality behind it to a patients relationship with their doctor. In this case, he is writing that his own reason is angry with him for ignoring it and giving into irrational ideas to the point where reason has left him. He has been driven mad by passion and by his love. "Past cure I am, now reason is past care" is Shakespeare's way of saying that he is too far gone. He has been driven out of sanity by his love and there is no way back. He likes his thoughts and actions to those of a madman's. ("My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are") In the final couplet, there is a large twist. He references his earlier sonnets where he compared his lover to the sun and called them fair and bright, when in actually they are "black as hell, and dark as night."
   This sonnet shows the dark side of love that has not been shown in previous sonnets. This poem focuses on the lustful, greedy nature of love and how it can take hold of a person. The sonnet shows how love can drive people insane and make them blind to reality.
   According to an analysis by Robert Appelbaum, the poem "dramatizes a condition of the inner life, at once physical and mental, through which an individual has failed to prevent himself from falling in to the extreme, unhealthy madness of love." Appelbaum suggests that like a fever, love burns. He writes that since not much was known about fevers at the time, the subject of the sonnet acquired the fever through food. The subject continues to eat the food even though consuming more of the food will make the disease worse. Appelbaum goes on to explain that when the subject's reason left him, he cannot keep himself from continually eating this food and making his fever worse. He says that the first two quatrains paint the picture of a man who has spiraled out of control due to his disease and has accepted that death is the only conclusion.