Sweet Love, Renew Thy Force

The Sonnets of William Shakespeare provide a window into the speech and diction of an alien time and place. Requiring effort to fully interpret, the Shakespearian sonnets have been called obsolete, antiquated, and (most horribly) useless. What a Shakespearian sonnet does provide, to those of us willing to engage with them, is a form with which to say something beautifully simple in a simply beautiful way.

In Shakespeare's "Sonnet 106," the speaker expresses a very simple idea in a very complicated way. The first quatrain of the poem is as follows:

Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but to-day by feeding is allayed,
To-morrow sharpened in his former might

In these lines, the speaker conveys that love should strive to be better than hunger, which is renewed everyday despite having been satiated on the previous day. Love becomes something with an edge that can be blunted, like a knife or sword, which is a fitting metaphor, because, while love can be wonderful, it can also be dangerous and hurtful. By comparing love to appetite, the speaker insists that love is constant, but by saying that love's blade should be sharper, the speaker also implies that there should be more to love than constancy.

The poem continues to play with the metaphor of consumption in the second quatrain of the poem:

So, love, be thou, although to-day thou fill
Thy hungry eyes, even till they wink with fullness,
To-morrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love, with a perpetual dullness

Love is now explicitly identified as “hungry;” it must eat its fill every day to retain a sort of bright sharpness that the speaker seems to want to ascribe to it. What this quatrain introduces is the idea that sight, or more specifically the vision of the object of love's affection, is the only thing that can satiate love. At the same time, however, the speaker suggests that the challenge of love is that it must survive overindulgence. The word "dullness" in the final line serves both as an adjective for a sword and to describe the effect of eating too much.

In the third quatrain, the speaker addresses the waxing and waning tides of love that was hinted at in the first quatrain:

Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view
Here, the speaker trades the blade metaphor for a piece of oceanic imagery. Lovers are like those who come daily to opposite seashores to rediscover one another, and the space between them makes their love seem more rare and beautiful.

The speaker offers an interesting addition with the final couplet, suggesting that instead of the simile of the ocean, the better image might be that of winter:

As call it winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer's welcome, thrice more wished, more rare.

The introduction of “winter” suggests that, like a person weathering a 16th century winter, the lull of love which follows satiation must valued, for it is specifically the trials of the harsher season that enable passion’s heated return.

Understanding love as cyclic and seasonal, given to periods of glorious passion and “sad” disconnection, Sonnet 106 offers that telltale combination of the romantic and the realistic that characterize the Shakespearean sonnets as a whole. With both their language and their insights into the human condition, they leave us hungry for more.

--Bobby White