Sonnet 137: Thou Blind Fool Love, What Dost Thou to Mine Eyes
SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, RelivedShow Notes
In Sonnet 137, William Shakespeare draws together two of the themes established by the 'Dark Lady Sonnets' thus far: his mistress's unconventional beauty and her sexual freedom. Following the near-obsessive punning of Sonnets 135 and 136, which lent them a humorous, light-hearted tone, our poet settles back into a more evenly rounded style that is easier on our eye and ear, but no less acute in its observation and in fact ostensibly more fierce in its assessment of the situation: Sonnet 137, for all its poetic metaphorising pulls no punches and portrays this woman's looks no longer as merely 'different' but as downright ugly, and her body as a place that gives access for all men to ride. Still, the conclusion it reaches is not one of condemnation, but of contented resignation: this is how it is now and I am thus in my desire and affection tied to her.
More from SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived
In this, the – at least for the time-being – final episode of his podcast on William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Sebastian Michael offers a brief summary of his findings and also takes the opportunity to examine in a little more detail the view held by some contemporary editors that the sonnets may not principally be about a Fair Youth and a Dark Lady – a contention that is largely based on a supposition that many of these poems "could be addressed to a male or a female" as one recent edition puts it – to see whether it stands up to scrutiny as we formulate any conclusion.
In this special episode, Sebastian Michael is joined by architect, author, and coder Miro Roman to talk about their experimentation with applying a machine learning approach to comparing the full text of William Shakespeare's Sonnets to the full text of his plays and narrative poems to examine whether such a methodology can confirm the rare word analysis research that has previously been carried out by Macdonald P Jackson and others towards dating the sonnets.
In this special edition of Sonnetcast, Sebastian Michael takes a closer look at our original source for William Shakespeare's Sonnets, examining in detail the few textual issues it presents, the much debated origin of the manuscript, and the dedication by its publisher Thomas Thorpe to a "Mr. W. H." which has been puzzling readers of these poems for centuries.
Following an established tradition at the time, William Shakespeare furnishes his collection of 154 Sonnets with a poetic Complaint that acts as a coda to the series.
Sonnet 154 brings to a close William Shakespeare's collection of sonnets, and it does so hand-in-hand with Sonnet 153, of which it is not a continuation, but a reiteration.