Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, June 6th, 2024.

Today's poem is Sonnet 147 from William Shakespeare.

Many people like to read or attempt to read all of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a kind of unified whole,

sometimes called his sonnet cycle, or several smaller unified holes in which all or a large

number of the sonnets can be read together in a kind of narrative arc where the

speaker of many poems is the same character from poem to poem and is addressing the same

beloved across multiple poems. There are many varying theories about the best way to do this and what

sorts of meaning emerges if you do. There are also plenty of people who I think this is a

terrible idea and have spilled a lot of ink trying to debunk it, or at least argue that it's not

the most profitable exercise. I don't have a camp that I'm strongly devoted to.

I've seen it go badly on both sides.

I think there are some things that you miss if you blindly ignore any kind of unifying themes or structure in the sonnets,

but also I've seen some really wacky stuff read into them in that way.

But as a note today, Sonnet 147 comes late in the sonnet cycle and falls amid other sonnets that have taken up the theme of

frustrated love, which will be important as we read today. Here is sonnet 147. My love is as a fever, longing still for that which longer nurses

the disease, feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, the uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, angry

that his prescriptions are not kept, hath left me, and I, desperate, now approved desire is

death, which physic did accept. Past cure I am, now reason is past care, and frantic mad with evermore

unrest. My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are, at random from the truth vainly expressed,

for I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

So as I said, this poem comes late in Shakespeare's cycle of sonnets.

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