ABSTRACT
In Sonnet 147, Shakespeare memorably describes the subjective experience of lovesickness. The opening quatrain focuses on the self-consuming nature of the disease. Love perverts the appetites and creates a condition where the body can no longer judge what is and is not healthy. (Although Sonnet 147 is not explicit about the gender of the person who is “black as hell and dark as night,” its place in the sequence of the sonnets as well as its rhetoric of darkness strongly suggest the reference is to the “dark lady” with whom the speaker is engaged in a troubled sexual relationship.) Love comes to crave the very poison that is killing it:
My love is as a fever, longing still For that which longer nurseth the disease, Feeding on that which does preserve the ill, Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.
