146 From Sonnets

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      Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
      Lord of these rebel powers that thee array,
      Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
      Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
5    Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
      Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
      Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
      Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
      Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
10  And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
      Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
      Within be fed, without be rich no more.
       So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
       And death once dead, there's no more dying then.

Editor´s Comments

The sonnet is a small form, only 14 lines, and tightly restricted in its patterns of rhyme and even its logic. Maybe that's why poets in the 1590s suddenly felt the urge to write so many sonnets. Most of the important poets of the time wrote sequences of sonnets -- Shakespeare's sonnet, "Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth," is part of a sequence of a hundred and fifty-four poems. So it's only natural to ask whether it makes a difference if you read just a single poem from one of these sequences, or if you read all of them together. Most of the poems on this Web site are single poems, but even when they are not using as specific a convention as that of the sonnet sequence, poets often write poems in a series, poems which in some way belong together. Then the question is, how is a poem changed, in its meaning or in its impact, by the presence around it of other poems?

For the sonnet sequences, there was usually some kind of continuing story line having to do with the difficulties of love. Shakespeare's sequence is no different on this score, although there are several characters involved, particularly a young man, and later someone referred to as the "dark lady." And because the sonnets included a dedication to a "Mr. W. H." when they were published, scholars have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what all this might have to do with Shakespeare's real life. The chances of proving anything about that are pretty slim, but it's still the case that each one of these sonnets exists in a context of other sonnets. After reading #146 you might go and find the rest of the sequence, and think about how this poem might be changed if you had already read 145 poems about a very complex and changing set of love relationships.

Historical Considerations

By the time Shakespeare began to write, traditional conceptions about the order of the cosmos, and about the human place in the cosmos, had begun to be shaken. In 1543, Copernicus had published his work arguing that the earth revolved around the sun, while Machiavelli had challenged the notion of a divinely ordered state through his new conception of politics based on the realities of power. European explorations continued to redraw the map of the known world in radical ways. Nevertheless, older paradigms for understanding the cosmos, such as the Ptolemaic model of the universe, in which the earth was the center of a system of concentric spheres, continued to exert a powerful hold on European thought. For a poet, the metaphoric power of the older model, in which the soul inhabited the body, while the body was the very essence of a fallen earth, contingent and eternally besieged by sin, continued to be indispensable. In "Sonnet 146," when Shakespeare used this powerful and traditional metaphor of the soul as center of a sinful earth, he was drawing on intellectual precepts that were not only deeply held in his time, but also, increasingly, bitterly contested.

From Robert Fludd's " Utriusque Cosmi Historia."

Engraving from Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617-1619).

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