Love is the most important subject for this speaker/poet of the sonnets. The "little songs" do consistently sing of it-not ordinary or romantic love but soul love.
First Quatrain: “Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said”
In Shakespeare Sonnet 56, the speaker addresses his favorite subject, his conception of divine love. He avers that “[s]weet love” replenishes itself. Sweet love or soul love exists in an eternal transcendental state, not like ordinary physical appetite/hunger, that although fed, will return again and again.
Sweet love, however, exists as a perpetual force. It is ever renewed on the ethereal plane. Sweet love emanates from the Divine and resides in the soul. It possesses an “edge” that is never “blunter than appetite.” The speaker dramatizes this special soul love as he delineates its elongated perpetuity.
Second Quatrain: “So, love, be thou, although to-day thou fill”
In the second quatrain, continuing to address “love,” the speaker asserts that as love “fill[s] / Thy hungry eyes,” even as it “wink[s]” with such “fulness,” the spirit of love prevents its ever become an instrument of “dulness.”
While the reader senses that “love” addressed in this way would usually be construed as personification, the line is blurred so that a “person” is never fully drawn on the physical level, only on the soul level.
One may become overfull of drink or food, but of this soul love, the hunger or desire remains although the lover is satiated. This “love” is Dickinson’s “liquor never brewed.” The lover may drink his/her fill of this love and still remain in a state of joyful awareness, never becoming a victim of the hang-over, as the ordinary drunk may, but always remaining divinely tipsy.
Third Quatrain: “Let this sad interim like the ocean be”
With ordinary romantic love, the lovers part and experience emptiness during the “sad interim.” The lovers may feel that they are separated by space as wide as the ocean. And when they once again appear in each other’s sight, they think they are “more blest” and feel the “[r]eturn of love.”
But with soul love, the love remains and fills not only the lovers’ eyes and ears and other senses but affords a self-alertness the allows the lover to remain ever wrapped in the arms of the Beloved. No ocean can separate them. They remain on the “banks” of this permanent Ocean of Love.
The Couplet: “As call it winter, which being full of care”
On the ordinary physical level of being where “winter” will bring its chill to even the warmest romantic relationship, the lovers will find themselves “full of care.” But soul love beckons with a perpetual “summer’s welcome,” even though it is rarer than the vestiges of ordinary love. The lovers will yearn three-times more strongly for this level of soul love, even before they are aware of that yearning.
The speaker dramatizes the unseen and makes palpable the ethereal plane of existence in order to fulfill his destiny of filling his sonnets with truth.
Other Shakespeare articles: Who is Shakespeare?
Sonnet Commentaries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 73, 96, 116, 126, 130, 138
