Love

Love

Anyone who has been in love, especially if the love object is scornful or infidelitous, has been able to turn to any station and say “every pop song on the radio is suddenly speaking to me,” as Ani DiFranco sings in her song “Superhero”. 1 Petrarchan love sonnets, the antiquated predecessors of the modern “pop love song”, depict love with some sense of perfection, sweetness, and chastity, with the beautiful, infallible blonde as the love object, however both with a sense of unattainability. Shakespeare’s later sonnets, 127-152, dealing with the “dark lady”, the antithesis of the Petrarchan model of love, however, may be a more accurate predecessor, nearly all dealing with the torments and imperfections of love and its source, after its having been attained. Sonnets 141-142 are a pinnacle of the later part of the sequence, summarizing the emotions and the object depicted in the other sonnets.

The first quatrain of sonnet 141 describes love as being immune to physical deficiency, yet pulled in by these same impurities. As described by the psychologist character played by Robin Williams in the film “Good Will Hunting”, it is the little quirks and imperfections one becomes attached to.2 As stated in sonnet 141, often in love one may feel as if they might not “love [someone] with [one’s] eyes/ for they in [them] see a thousand errors note.” (141.1-2) Often a lover finds physical faults with the desired one in an attempt to check their own emotions. Here, the narrator sees the faults, but discards that sense in his emotion. Other sonnets lead up to or echo this conclusion. To elaborate on this neglect of surface appearance, a lover may wonder, along with the narrator in sonnet 139, “Thou blind fool love, what dost ...

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...maxims and clichés echoing Shakespeare’s words are still spoken of today, the “little quirks”, the faults in appearance one may find in the other, the powerlessness of love, the love as a “plague”, the fine line between amity and enmity, the intentional ignorance of wrongdoings, the karmic cycle, and most importantly, the masochism. Sonnets 141 and 142 bring this all together, describing the love itself, the captivity, the pain, the love/hate, and the vengeance that comes with rejection, and can be used as a summation of the sonnets of the later part of the sequence of the “dark lady”.

1. Ani DiFranco. Dilate. Righteous Babe, 1996.

2. Good Will Hunting. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Perf. Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck,

and Minnie Driver. Mirimax, 1997

3. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Oxford University Press,

1997