Mojo, The Bard, & Me

My love is as a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease;

-Narrator

Sonnet 147

Sonnet time again. Turning to the messed up sonnet book we find the following synopsis of Sonnet 147 by Katherine Duncan-Jones:

Identifying his passion for the woman as a disease, the speaker shows himself abandoned by reason and in the grip of love-madness, which has deranged his judgement.

Hmmm. Well today’s lines are the first two lines of the sonnet. Remember, fourteen lines to a sonnet. And I think you can see that Will is certainly doing as Katherine says, describing his love as a disease, a fever. Ms Duncan-Jones also suggests that ‘longing still / For that which longer’ implies that the speaker wants to prolong the fever. Thoughts anyone?

I guess to be fair, if we’re going to get into an analysis of a sonnet, we’d pretty much have to look at the whole thing. Yes, all fourteen lines. But I’m not prepared to do that today. I’m just going to take these two lines as they are. Sounds like, ‘My love is making me delirious with sweat and I want it to continue.’ Yeah, that’s about it. Does that sound right to you?

Now, before I go to today's picture I wanted to tell you about an article I was reading in Arts and Letters an hour ago. It was about a book review of a new book that purports to answer the question of who Will was writing the sonnets to. So that's kind of relevant, don't you think? If you're interested, here's the link to the sonnet article. 

Okay, now you can have the pic.

I don't remember exactly what I was doing this day, but I was obviously working hard because I'm wearing my eye protection and my patented sponge sweatband. So I'm pretty sure it wasn't the delirium of love that was making me sweat (or causing me to give that hairy eyeball).