Sonnet 75 Dissatisfaction Quotes

Have we said before that the opening of the poem is very pretty? We have. But you know what? Sometimes pretty isn't enough. When you actually think about them, these two lines already give hints of the speaker's coming dissatisfaction. What do food and rain have in common? For one thing, they're both necessary for life. That's check one in the pretty category. But they also both need to be continually replenished. There is no permanent meal or permanent rainfall that will leave a person or the ground satisfied for, well, life. That's check one in the discomforted uneasy dissatisfaction category.

How do we know that the speaker is going to end with dissatisfaction? Because his feelings towards his beloved seem so completely focused on achieving satisfaction. Isn't that what he means when he says that he wants to achieve "peace of you"? But how can you ever really have enough of a person you love? If the speaker were content to settle with a happy medium, he might not fall into such extreme despair. But by expecting to be completely satisfied with his beloved, doesn't he just set himself up for disappointment?

As we have talked about elsewhere on this module, these lines show how the speaker is bound to be dissatisfied. If his experience of being with his beloved leads to feelings of "pride," that means that he is already thinking about his relationship through the eyes of other people. And that line of thinking leads to the fear that they will take his beloved away from him.

These lines express indecisiveness. The speaker can't decide which he prefers: being alone with his beloved, or flaunting his beloved in public. Doesn't the poem as a whole make it seem likely that the speaker could just as well have added a third line here saying, "Oh wait, actually, I think it's better to be with you alone"? We at Shmoop sure think so. And when you can't settle on any one way of being, dissatisfaction is the inevitable result.

These lines convey essentially the same idea as lines 7-8. By constantly wavering between two options, the speaker makes himself unable to be satisfied.

These lines suggest the root of the speaker's dissatisfaction. If the speaker has to "pursue" the "delight" he gets from "you," and if some of that delight "must from you be took," maybe his beloved doesn't really like him that much after all. It's gotta be darn hard to be satisfied with being in love with somebody who doesn't love you back.

Nothing sums up the speaker's feelings of dissatisfaction like these two lines—-which is exactly as it should be, because they are the last two lines of the poem. By veering between the metaphorical extremes of overeating and starvation, the speaker makes satisfaction an impossibility and dissatisfaction a guarantee. Also, because these lines are essentially a rehash of ideas already expressed several times in the poem (beginning in line 5), you could also say that it's kind of a dissatisfying ending to the poem. But then again, isn't it somehow appropriate to end a poem about dissatisfaction on a dissatisfying note? And does recognizing the appropriateness make it somehow satisfying? Beats us—but you can be our guest to ponder such questions.