Sonnet 146

Sonnet 146, which William Shakespeare addresses to his soul, his "sinful earth", is a pleading appeal to himself to value inner qualities and satisfaction rather than outward appearance.

Q1 The speaker addresses his soul, which he pictures as a poor or empty interior, as opposed to his body, a gaudy exterior. Q2 He questions the soul's "large cost" lavished on a body which will shortly die. Q3 Continuing his financial metaphor, he urges the soul to turn the body's inevitable loss into the soul's gain. C Thus as death feeds on men, the soul can feed on death, rendering the soul immortal.

Sonnet 146 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 14th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

The 4th line begins with a common metrical variant, the initial reversal:

An initial reversal also occurs in line 3, and potentially in lines 6, 8, 9, and 13. A mid-line reversal occurs in line 5. The metrical interpretations of the beginnings of lines 5 and 9 are especially dependent upon the rhetorical emphasis chosen. In line 5, any of the first three syllables could potentially take the first ictus. In line 9 any of four readings is rhetorically possible:

The relative frequency of initial reversals and regular lines, and a characteristically Shakespearean use of metrical expectations to emphasize pronouns, suggest that readings with only an initial reversal or a regular meter may be the most appropriate.

The sonnet is notable for its uncharacteristically religious tone and call for moral richness, whereas most sonnets treasure earthly qualities of beauty and love. In its vocabulary and vocative address to the soul the sonnet invites comparison with Psalm 146.

Although Michael West has persuasively argued that this sonnet is indebted to the medieval genre of poetic dialogues between soul and body, the extent to which sonnet actually presents conventional Christian arguments about the relationship between body and soul is a matter of considerable critical debate. John Crowe Ransom counters an older tradition of reading the sonnet in straightforward Christian terms by making the general observation that the "divine terms which the soul buys are not particularly Christian: there are few words in the poem that would directly indicate a conventional religious dogma." B.C. Southam makes an effort to build on Ransom's passing remark in a more developed argument about the sonnet which seeks to show that Shakespeare's speaker is inspired more by a "humanist" philosophy that ironically undermines a rigidly Christian "rigorous asceticism which glorifies the life of the body at the expense of the vitality and richness of sensuous experience." Southam's argument for an ironically humanist poem is countered, in turn, by Charles A. Huttar, who attempts to bring the poem back into alignment with a certain Christian worldview: for example, Huttar claims that "these rebel powers" that "array" the soul in line 2 refer not to "the physical being" or body but rather to the lower powers of the soul itself, the passions or affections. Understood in this way, the sentiment of the poem appears in accord with a certain Christian tradition that rejects "extreme asceticism".