Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;
Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
If I might teach thee wit, better it were,
Though not to love, yet, love, to tell me so;
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near,
No news but health from their physicians know;
For, if I should despair, I should grow mad,
And in my madness might speak ill of thee:
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,
Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be. That I may not be so, nor thou belied, Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.
Sonnet 140 is one of
154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet
William Shakespeare. Sonnet 140 is one of the
Dark Lady sonnets, in which the poet writes to a mysterious woman who rivals the
Fair Youth for the poet's affection.
Structure
Sonnet 140 is an English or Shakespearean
sonnet. The English sonnet has three
quatrains, followed by a final rhyming
couplet. It follows the typical
rhyme scheme of the form ABAB CDCD EFEF GG and is composed in
iambic pentameter, a type of poetic
metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The 3rd line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:
× / × / × / × / × /
Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express (140.3)
Line 14 exhibits two common metrical variations: an initial reversal, and (potentially) the rightward movement of the third ictus (resulting in a four-position figure, × × / /, sometimes referred to as a minor ionic):
A mid-line reversal is found in line 5, with potential initial reversals in lines 9 and 10. A minor ionic is present in line 12 and potentially in line 9.
The meter demands that line 12's "slanderers" function as two syllables.[2]