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Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[...] these rebel powers that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
The speaker addresses this poem to his soul, asking it in the first stanza why it, the center of his “sinful earth” (that is, his body), endures misery within his body while he is so concerned with maintaining its “paint[ed]” outward appearance—that is, why his soul allows his exterior vanity to wound its interior life. He asks his soul why, since it will not spend long in the body (“having so short a lease” in the “fading mansion”), it spends “so large cost” to decorate it, and he asks whether worms shall be allowed to eat the soul’s “charge” after the body is dead. In the third quatrain, the speaker exhorts his soul to concentrate on its own inward well-being at the expense of the body’s outward walls (“Let that [i.e., the body] pine to aggravate [i.e., increase] thy store”). He says that the body’s hours of “dross” will buy the soul “terms divine”; and admonishes the soul to be fed within, and not to be rich without. In the couplet, the speaker tells the soul that by following his advice, it will feed on death, which feeds on men and their bodies; and once it has fed on death, it will enjoy eternal life: “And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”
Read a translation of Sonnet 146
Sonnet
Read more about real beauty versus cliched beauty as a theme.
Apart from the textual controversy, Sonnet
Read more about stopping the march towards death as a motif.
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