Sonnet 140
Be wise as thou art cruel: Do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain,
Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
If I might teach thee wit: Better it were,
Though not to love, yet love to tell me so,
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near,
No news but health from their physicians know.
For if I should despair I should grow mad,
And in my madness might speak ill of thee;
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,
Mad sland’rers by mad ears believèd be.
That I may not be so, nor thou belied,
Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.
Sonnet 140 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Sonnet 140 is one of the Dark Lady sonnets, in which the poet writes to a mysterious woman who rivals the Fair Youth for the poet's affection.
Structure
Sonnet 140 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet. This type of sonnet consists of three quatrains followed by a couplet, and follows the form's rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg. This sonnet, like most of the others in the sequence, is written in iambic pentameter, a type of metre with five pairs of unstressed/stressed syllables per line.
| Stress | x | / | x | / | x | / | x | / | x | / |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Syllable | And | in | my | mad | ness | might | speak | ill | of | thee. |
Interpretations
- Edward Fox, for the 2002 compilation album, When Love Speaks (EMI)
External links
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