Sonnet 75 Suffering Quotes

The transition from lines 1-2 to lines 3-4 sums up the central fact about the suffering experienced by the speaker of this poem: it's the flipside of what's pleasurable. As you can see, the first two lines here describe nice, pleasant, beautiful things. But because those things are so nice, people can experience an overpowering desire for them—which can sometimes prevent them from ever being satisfied. This is the key to the suffering (or, as he puts, it "strife") experienced by the poem's speaker. Just like a miser, he can never truly enjoy the thing he loves most.

These lines show how the speaker's suffering is typically experienced: as a kind of conflict within himself that makes him unable to settle down with what he's got. One moment he's proud with what he's got, the next he's afraid that other people will steal it. The poem as a whole makes it seem likely that this process doesn't just go from A to B, but that, instead, the two possibilities constantly flip-flop back and forth from one to the other.

Here we see pretty much the same idea as in lines 5-6. Here, though, we get more of the sense that the speaker is the cause of his own misery. If it's the speaker's own desire to showcase his love to the world, he can't really blame the world for showing an interest, can he? Unfortunately, that's just too reasonable. The speaker will probably have to hit the rock-bottom of despair before he gets off the painful course he's on.

Same idea once again: just like Mick Jagger, the speaker can't get no satisfaction. Unlike Mick Jagger, though, the speaker doesn't have legions of screaming groupies climbing over each other to hurl themselves at him. That's a surefire recipe for suffering if we've ever seen one.

These lines seem to reveal the root causes of the rest of the speaker's suffering. That's because they make it sound like the speaker's relationship with his beloved isn't all that loving after all. Of course, the fact that the other person doesn't necessarily love the speaker back would probably cause enough suffering on its own. But maybe it's part of Shakespeare's insight into human nature to point out how that little beginning can balloon into a whole host of other problems, just because the speaker can't face the facts. Does that seem like a fair interpretation of the poem to you? Does it seem true to life?

These lines sum up the suffering of the speaker. Caught between the painful extremes of an empty stomach and a bloated one, he can't ever be satisfied. Did you notice the weird grammar of the last line, which forces you to supply some missing words (at the very least, you've got to understand it as saying "Either gluttoning on all, or [with] all away")? Could this breakdown in ordinary language be Shakespeare's way of acting out, in language, the suffering that the speaker is experiencing?