Sonnet 114: Or Whether Doth My Mind, Being Crowned With You
SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, RelivedShow Notes
With his curiously cryptic Sonnet 114, William Shakespeare poses a rhetorical question to his younger lover, asking whether his experience of seeing him in everything he looks at is down simply to his eye flattering him, or to his eye having acquired the ancient mystical art of alchemy and actually turning even ugly creatures into beautiful angelic beings just such as the young man himself.
He then also settles the matter emphatically and declares without reservation that it is indeed flattery on the eye's part that has this effect on him, but that any sin the mind may be committing in lapping it all up is mitigated by the fact that the eye too loves what it wants to see – the young man's beauty – and so willingly tastes of this flattering, though therefore potentially poisonous, potion first, before passing it on for the mind to metaphorically imbibe.
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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.