Theme: I Love
Content: A brilliantly, complex and punning sonnet on falseness & truth and how it affects one's perception of seeing love.
O me!
What eyes hath
love
put in my head,
Which have no
correspondence with true
sight!
Or if they have,
where is my judgement fled,
That censures falsely
what they see
aright?
- No features throughout this sonnet and resonates through several words such as O and so.
- O itself is a euphemism for the female genitalia and O me could be construed here to be an instruction rather than an exclamation. The sexual significance of O is particularly well emphasised in the O cunning of the couplet.
- eye (or variants thereof) features in every quatrain and the couplet of this sonnet with a total of 5 instances.
- love (or variants thereof) also features in every quatrain and the couplet of this sonnet with a total of 5 instances.
- The ubiquitous presence of eye and love inevitably conveys the punning message eye love: I love.
If that be fair whereon my false
eyes dote,
What means
the world to say it is not
so?
If it be not,
then love doth
well
denote
Love's eye
is not sotrue
as all men's.
No,
- see (or variants thereof) is explicitly present in the couplet and every quatrain but this one. Yet see is indeed present here, hidden in false eyes, denoting that the eyes are false so can't really properly see.
- The disarray that the author feels at not being able to reconcile what he feels for the mistress with what others think of her is reinforced by the deliberate awkward enjambment of No at the end of line 8.
- means morphs to men's.
- Possible pun on the author's first name in well as in "If the woman is not fair (which she is not) then love denotes Will".
How can it? O,
how can love's
eye
be true,
That is so
vexed with watching and with tears?
No marvel then though
I
mistake my view:
The sun itself sees
not
till heaven clears.
- false (or variants thereof) is explicitly present in the couplet and every quatrain but this one. Yet false is indeed present here, hidden in the Quarto spelling of self (felfe) with the visually interchangeable s and near-f, false falsely spelled emphasising that something here is false and wrong.
- The author questions how love's eye can be true that leads his own (punned) I to make mistake.
O cunning
love, with tears thou keep'st me blind
Lest eyes,
well seeing,
thy foul faults should find!
- Pun on "cunt" in cunning, as elsewhere in Shakespeare's works.
- The falseness of the quatrains morphs into the faults of the mistress.
- false is also anagrammatically represented in the Quarto spelling of Lest (Leaft) and suitably adjacent to eyes to falsely repeat Q2's false eyes.
- No true in the couplet as the author is blind and if he could see he would only see the mistress's faults.
- foul faults should find provides perfect alliteration especially as the Quarto prints the s as a near-f rendering: foul faults fhould find.
Critical text © NigelDavies.home@Virgin.net