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Shakespeare's Sonnets

Chapter 48: XLVII
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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.

XLVII

Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,
And each doth good turns now unto the other:
When that mine eye is famish’d for a look,
Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother,
With my love’s picture then my eye doth feast,
And to the painted banquet bids my heart;
Another time mine eye is my heart’s guest,
And in his thoughts of love doth share a part:
So, either by thy picture or my love,
Thyself away, art present still with me;
For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,
And I am still with them, and they with thee;
    Or, if they sleep, thy picture in my sight
    Awakes my heart, to heart’s and eye’s delight.