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Shakespeare's Sonnets

Chapter 47: XLVI
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About This Book

A sequence of lyric sonnets presents a speaker who examines love, beauty, time, and mortality through intimate, shifting addresses. Many poems urge a beloved to preserve beauty through progeny, while others meditate on aging and the ravages of time; a contrasting strand records erotic passion, jealousy, and betrayal. The pieces vary tone from pleading to defiance and experiment with sonnet form and rhetorical argument, often asserting poetry’s power to memorialize. Recurring images and contrapuntal voices probe desire, artistic rivalry, and the tension between physical love and spiritual admiration.

XLVI

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,
A closet never pierced with crystal eyes;
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To side this title is impannelled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart;
And by their verdict is determined
The clear eye’s moiety, and the dear heart’s part:
    As thus; mine eye’s due is thy outward part,
    And my heart’s right, thy inward love of heart.