My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
Perhaps as a natural continuation of the renunciation of the previous sonnet, or perhaps independently of it, the poet here reflects on his woeful state. He is like a patient in a fever who has been declared by the physician to be past cure. All his thoughts and words are like those of madmen, and everything is uttered at random, without any coherence. His fever lends him words, and although he cannot explain his infatuation, he feels it to be wrong, and yet he is compelled to continue drinking and eating the same noxious food which brought on his disease in the first place. Hence there is no escape for him, and he sees himself trapped in the black vortex of hell in which his mistress resides, and there is no release from the darkness.
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