Sonnet 146

The Dark Lady: Reckoning

1 Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
2 My sinful earth these rebel powers array,
3 Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
4 Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
5 Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
6 Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
7 Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
8 Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
9 Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
10 And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
11 Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
12 Within be fed, without be rich no more:
13 So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
14 And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.

Notes

TLN 2030cultural context
“Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth”
The speaker directly addresses his own soul. 'Sinful earth' is the body — the mortal, fallen flesh that the soul inhabits. The soul is called the 'centre' because Christian thought located it within the body as its ruling core, though the body continually rebels against it. The repetition of 'my sinful earth' that opens line 2 was almost certainly a compositor's mistake in the 1609 Quarto printing; every editor since has emended those words to something else ('Fool'd by those rebel powers that thee array,' 'Thrall to those,' etc.), though no reading is universally agreed.
historical The 1609 Quarto and 'Mr. W.H.'
TLN 2031archaic vocab
“rebel powers array”
'Rebel powers' are the body's appetites — hunger, desire, the senses — which mutiny against the soul's authority. 'Array' here means to marshal or equip for battle, as an army is arrayed before a fight. The soul is besieged from within by the very body it inhabits.
TLN 2038archaic vocab
“live thou upon thy servant's loss, And let that pine to aggravate thy store”
The soul is told to live at the body's expense, as a master would live on a servant's labour. 'Pine' means to waste away or starve — here the body should do the suffering and deprivation it has imposed on the soul. 'Aggravate' is an archaic usage meaning to make heavier or increase — not (as in modern usage) to irritate. 'Thy store' is the soul's stock or supply of spiritual wealth: the body's self-denial adds to it.
TLN 2040archaic vocab
“Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross”
'Dross' is the waste matter — slag or impurities — skimmed off molten metal during smelting; by extension, anything worthless or cheap. 'Hours of dross' are the soul's wasted worldly hours spent on vanity. 'Terms divine' are stretches of sacred or eternal time — increments of immortal life purchased by renouncing earthly pleasures. The line frames the soul's choice as a trade: give up the cheap stuff, gain the priceless.
TLN 2042biblical allusion
“feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there's no more dying then”
The couplet delivers the sonnet's central paradox: if the soul turns the body's mortality into spiritual nourishment, then Death — which normally feeds on human lives — will itself be consumed and die. Once Death is dead, dying ends. The argument draws on Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (15:26, 15:54-55), where the resurrection of Christ is said to swallow Death in victory, making it 'the last enemy' to be destroyed.