A.k.a. “Two loves I have of comfort and despair”
John’s related banter…
I still think it’s worth noting and understanding that all of the most romantic and loving of the sonnets are those addressed to the young man. Like sonnets 127-154, the ones addressed to the so called “black mistress” are a lot darker and no one’s reading those at weddings. But about the “black mistress” or “dark lady” who appears in those sonnets, we also don’t know who she is. Scholars have suggested royal waiting women, female poets, at least one British-African brothel owner; but we don’t even know if she was black as we use the term today, or just brunette in contrast to the blond young man.
But the dark lady sonnets are more complicated than the one’s addressed to the young man. The speaker feels tormented and ashamed of his sexual attraction to the woman and even in the sonnets praising her he gets as we’ll see some insults in. Like in sonnet 144 he actually compares the two muses. He talks of having two loves:
crashcourse | Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Crash Course Literature 304)
(Unquoted beginning)
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
(Unquoted remainder)
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And, whether that my angel be turn’d fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,
But being both from me both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
John Green Reads Poetry 