Sonnet 118: Like as to Make Our Appetite More Keen
Sonnet 118: Like as to Make Our Appetite More Keen - meaning Summary
Preventive Love Backfires
The speaker compares deliberately courting small pains to prevent greater harms with taking strong medicines: he deliberately introduced bitterness into a satisfied love to forestall future wounds. That precaution became self-fulfilling, turning imagined maladies into real faults. The poem concludes that attempts to preemptively guard love by causing suffering only poison the relationship. It warns that prophylactic measures in love can create the very harm they sought to avoid.
Read Complete AnalysesLike as to make our appetite more keen With eager compounds we our palate urge, As to prevent our maladies unseen, We sicken to shun sickness when we purge. Even so being full of your ne’er-cloying sweetness, To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding; And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness To be diseased ere that there was true needing. Thus policy in love t’ anticipate The ills that were not, grew to faults assured, And brought to medicine a healthful state Which, rank of goodness, would by ill be cured. But thence I learn and find the lesson true: Drugs poison him that so fell sick of you.
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