Sonnet 151

The Dark Lady: Reckoning

Notes

TLN 2100classical allusion
“Love is too young to know what conscience is”
Love here is personified as Cupid, the Roman god of desire, conventionally depicted as a young child — and therefore incapable of moral knowledge. The paradox in line 2 ('Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?') then immediately undercuts this excuse: the very faculty of moral feeling grows out of the experience of loving someone.
classical Cupid's golden and leaden arrows
TLN 2102wordplay
“gentle cheater, urge not my amiss”
'Gentle cheater' is a deliberate oxymoron: 'gentle' means well-born, tender, and loving; 'cheater' means one who deceives or defrauds. The speaker accuses the Dark Lady of treachery while addressing her with affection in the same breath. 'Urge not my amiss' means 'do not press me about my wrongdoing' — 'amiss' as a noun denoting fault or transgression.
TLN 2104archaic vocab
“I do betray My nobler part to my gross body's treason”
'Nobler part' means the rational soul or faculty of reason, as opposed to the body and its appetites. Renaissance moral philosophy divided the human being into a higher, rational soul (capable of virtue and conscience) and a lower, bodily nature driven by appetite and sensation. The speaker confesses that the Dark Lady's betrayal of him has caused him to betray his own soul to the demands of his flesh.