Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146: A Brief Critical Analysis
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146 is discussed as much for its religious terms, metaphors, and ideas as it is for its poetic merit.
Sonnet 146
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[Why feed’st] these rebel powers that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
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 thee upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggregate 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.
Background of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Like all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sonnet 146 was probably written in the mid to late 1590s. While the sonnets of Sidney, Spenser, and other contemporaries celebrate idealized women, Shakespeare’s sonnets are often introspective, brooding, and enigmatic. Sonnets 1 through 126 are addressed, it is generally agreed, to a beautiful young man. Twenty-six subsequent poems deal with an unfaithful, physically unattractive, yet somehow irresistible “dark lady.” Shakespeare circulated his sonnets among friends and acquaintances; he probably never intended for them to be published.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are considered to be among the best of the Elizabethan sonnet form, a style that was popular during his time. His precise tonal and textural control of language, combined with witty and often surprising turns of metaphors and ideas, often display Shakespeare’s strongest capabilities.
Explication of Sonnet 146
What happens in the poem?
* First quatrain: The poem is an internal monologue, essentially the poet’s persona speaking to himself. The speaker addresses his “soul,” comparing the soul to someone who languishes and pines away within a big house while going to great expense to make the house look beautiful and happy on the outside.
* The second quatrain: The house metaphor is expanded. Why, the soul is asked, does it invest so much in things of the temporal world — the fading mansion — when life is short and things of the world are temporary, ephemeral? Just at the end of the quatrain, the poet jumps out of the mansion metaphor to drive home the point that the body came from the earth and will return to the earth, with the help of the worms.
* Third quatrain: Here, at the point where the sonnet form generally turns, the soul is exhorted to invest within, not without: to trade the false, costly facades of the world for the inner “divine” values that will not fade with time. Let the outside wither (“pine”) so that the inner soul can prosper.
* Closing couplet: The feeding metaphor from the 3rd quatrain is continued and expanded. The couplet finishes the metaphor from the 1st quatrain of the starving person within the mansion. The ironic juxtaposition of death, that feeds on men, being fed on, and further Death itself being dead, is typical Shakespearean irony. So too is the use, in two lines, of the words “death” (twice), “dead” and “dying,” when the final image points to eternal life.
Sonnet 146 As Proof of Shakespeare’s Religion
Many readers view Sonnet 146 as proof of Shakespeare’s religious fervor. The poem sets up a body/soul dichotomy. Several words within the poem are religiously loaded — “soul” and “sinful” in the first line, “divine” in the 3rd quatrain. Further, the entire concept of abandoning the things of the world for the “greater” goal of eternal life — the crux of the poem’s argument — is distinctly religious. Such sentiment would have been typical of much poetry of the time.
However, several arguments can be made against this reading of Sonnet 146:
* In very few places in the rest of Shakespeare do we find any unequivocally religious overtones. He often is dark and brooding — think Hamlet, Lear, MacBeth — and this is usually due to reflections upon the transience of youth and the temporality of life, yet he seldom turns to the afterlife for consolation.
* The subject and metaphors in the sonnet would have been regularly heard by Shakespeare’s readers in their weekly sermon, so the poem wasn’t groundbreaking in its themes or images. Given the unpublished, epistolary nature of the sonnets, it’s possible that Sonnet 146 was composed for a priest or other cleric. In most of his poetry and in the plays, Shakespeare’s religion is so general as to be non-denominational and noncommittal, thus avoiding taking a stand in his troubled times, when the rift between the Church of England and Roman Catholicism was still relatively new and raw.
* Throughout his works, Shakespeare often refers to the power of art to “immortalize” its subjects, without implying any religious belief in actual eternal life. In Sonnet 18, for example, the speaker alludes to the power of poetry to give eternal “life” to his beloved, without suggesting that the beloved would actually enjoy any such benefit, spiritual or otherwise.
Readers are entitled to their own conclusions, of course, and Sonnet 146 lends itself to religious interpretation if one is so inclined. Critics have argued that Shakespeare was a catholic, a protestant, an atheist, a secularist. A fuller study of the sonnets, however, and of Shakespeare as a whole will produce little support for any particular view, other than that religion and the Bible were part and parcel of Shakespeare’s milieu and that, as with politics and history, he used them to good artistic effect.
Poetic Merits of Sonnet 146
It’s easier, though, to find poetic fault with Sonnet 146. The metaphors are choppy, jumping quickly from the mansion to the worms, and then to Death eating man and vice-versa. The “cost” theme mixes uneasily with the soul/body comparison. The progression of the conceit is convoluted, even for Shakespeare. There are too many rhetorical questions. The sermon-like topic is trite and facile.
Among readers and literary critics, the poem is a favorite of those who seek to attribute religious faith to Shakespeare, or who enjoy the poem as an affirmation of their own beliefs. And in the end, it is likely that Sonnet 146 is celebrated more for its religious ambiguity than for its poetic merits.
Sources and Further Reading
“A Literary History of England, 2nd Edition,” NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967, pp. 519–540.
“Shakespeare: The Complete Works.” G.B. Harrison, ed., NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968, p. 1592 ff.
“Was Shakespeare Catholic?” by David E. Anderson. Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, April 5, 2008. A balanced and exhaustive look at many various theories regarding Shakespeare’s religious beliefs.
