The Place 2 Be: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Critique of Sonnet 139

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

Theme: If Looks could Kill
Content: The author is anxious about his mistress having eyes for other men, highlighted by the many phonetic allusions to eyes. He handles his hurt by unconvincingly interpreting his mistress's looks as darts she fires at others but ultimately supplants this by his wish to be slain himself by her looks rather than her continue to look at other men.

O, call not me to justify the wrong
That thy unkindness lays upon my heart.
Wound me not with thine eye but with thy tongue;
Use power with power, and slay me not by art.

heart and eye are equally represented in this sonnet.

heart is also alluded to phonetically but only in art and dart.

eye though is phonetically alluded to in a mass of words including justify, unkindness, thine, thy, my, sight, thine, aside, might, bide, mine, my, might, I and probably enemies and injuries in Elizabethan pronunciation.

Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere, but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside.
What need'st thou wound with cunning when thy might
Is more than my o'erpressed defence can bide?

Probable pun on the female genitalia via cunning (cunt) alluding to the female subject wounding the author with her promiscuity.

There are, suitably, 2 eyes in this sonnet.

Let me excuse thee: “Ah, my love well knows
Her pretty looks have been mine enemies,
And therefore from my face she turns my foes
That they elsewhere might dart their injuries.”

Having opened the sonnet with a call for the author not to justify the female subject's wrong, he now excuses it.

The author's complaint of his mistress wounding him by looking at others is now contrived to be an action by his mistress to actually wound others with her looks that are likened to darts.

Yet do not so; but since I am near slain,
Kill me outright with looks, and rid my pain.

The author now chooses to be slain himself by his mistress's looks.

The eye wins the battle between eye and heart: the body can live without the eyes but not without the heart, so there is no representation of the heart in the concluding couplet but eyes are there in looks and punningly in I.