Sonnet CXLVII: My love is as a fever, longing still

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

My love is as a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’ 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 expressed:

    For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

    Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

This is a Shakespearean sonnet, but some of the end rhyme is eye rhyme. For example, love and approve, and care and are; they look like they would rhyme but when pronounced they don't. The rest of the poem is consistent with the Shakespearean sonnet, it has 3 quatrains which mostly follow the rhyme pattern, and it's turning point is right before the last two lines, and the last two lines rhyme and are a couplet. Shakespeare used this form the emphasize his message that love is like an illness. The first three quatrains talk about how he still wants to be with his mistress even after she did some questionable things, and then in the couplet he finally realizes how wrong it is of him to want her back. I honestly chose this sonnet because it was the one that I understood the most after first reading it. However, I really like this sonnet because it takes a different view on love. It compares love to a sickness which is not something that I have ever heard before. Shakespeare talks about how his love is like a fever and how he wants more from his mistress even though she betrayed him, and then at the turn he realizes that she is actually evil, or, "black as hell," and, "dark as night."