First Quatrain: “Two loves I have of comfort and despair”
In the first quatrain of sonnet 144, the speaker reports that there are “two loves” residing in his consciousness. The famous German poet/playwright, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, created a similar situation for his Faust, who uttered the word, “Zwei Seelen, ach!, wohnen in meinem Brust,” (Two spirits, alas, reside in my heart.)
This ambiguity continually presents a universal conundrum for the human condition. One wants to follow the path of goodness and morality, yet lustful urges tempt one to commit sins against the soul.
The great spiritual guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, explains that the mayic forces of duality confuse and delude human beings; it makes them think that evil will bring happiness, and that self-discipline will bring unhappiness, and by the time the poor indulgent fool learns the truth, s/he is usually deep in the sorrow that ignorance brings.
The speaker thus realizes that his better nature that would bring him “comfort” is often overruled by the “worser spirit” that brings him “despair.” The better nature is masculine and the “worser” is feminine. These distinctions do not refer to human gender; they refer to principles that correspond to the pairs of opposites found in maya. Both women and men come equipped with the problem, and both have to solve the problem the same way through transcendence of the physical and mental to arrive at the spiritual. Thus the better nature is “right fair,” while the worse is “colour’d ill.”
Second Quatrain: “To win me soon to hell, my female evil”
The “female evil,” if he continues to follow it, will lead him to hell, because it causes him to ignore, and therefore, weaken his “better angel.” Instead of becoming a saint, he will “be a devil.” The “foul pride” will overtake “his purity,” if he allows it to happen.
Third Quatrain: “And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend”
Because both urges live in the same speaker, he cannot be sure how he will keep the evil urge from overtaking the good one. Perhaps his “angel” will “be turn’d fiend,” but since they both live in him, he can only “guess one angel (lives) in another’s hell.” The two collide and the one causes the other to live in hell within him.
The Couplet: “Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt”
Because the speaker suspects he will never be able to mollify the two parts of his psyche, he will “live in doubt,” but maybe the bad angel will become so bad that the “good one” will be able ultimately to overcome and extinguish the bad one.
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