Sonnet 75: So Are You to My Thoughts as Food to Life

03/03/24 • 20 min

SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived

Sonnet 75 marks a moment of comparative calm in the turbulent relationship between William Shakespeare and his young lover.

With its sober assessment of a continuously conflicted world of emotions that oscillate between abundant joy at being allowed to bask in the presence of the young man and utter dejection at missing him when he is absent, the sonnet seems to reconcile its poet with the reality of loving a person who is, in matters of the heart and most likely others too, a law unto himself.

Sonnet 75 marks a moment of comparative calm in the turbulent relationship between William Shakespeare and his young lover.

Previous Episode

Sonnet 74: But Be Contented When That Fell Arrest

Sonnet 74 continues the argument from Sonnet 73, and now reflects on what will happen when I, the poet, William Shakespeare, am dead. My body will be buried and return to earth, but my spirit will live on in this poetry that I write for you, the young man, which is why the loss you experience at my death will be insignificant: it only entails my passing physical presence, not my essence. In this, the poem proves prophetic not only in relation to the young lover, but also in relation to the world as a whole, since we still very much possess the spirit of William Shakespeare in his writing, and it also flatly contradicts his own pronouncements made in the pair just preceding this one, Sonnets 71 & 72, in which he – somewhat disingenuously we thought then – presented his poetry as something that is supposed to be 'nothing worth'.

Next Episode

Sonnet 76: Why Is My Verse so Barren of New Pride

The deceptively unsensational Sonnet 76 asks a simple question and provides to this a straightforward enough answer that will hardly come as a surprise: how is it that I write one sonnet after another and they all sound the same? Because "I always write of you."

With this one declaration it settles a debate that – in view of its very existence bafflingly – has more recently reappeared in scholarly circles: are these sonnets, such as we have them in the collection originally published in the Quarto Edition of 1609, addressed to or written about principally one person, or could they not also have been composed in the context of a whole raft of relationships over a much longer period than has generally been assumed?