Sonnet 153

The Dark Lady: Reckoning

Notes

TLN 2128archaic vocab
“Cupid laid by his brand”
A 'brand' is a burning torch. Cupid, the Roman god of desire, was pictured in ancient poetry carrying a torch that set hearts alight — as well as his bow and arrows. Laying the brand aside to sleep is the premise on which the whole sonnet's myth turns.
classical Cupid's golden and leaden arrows
TLN 2133archaic vocab
“dateless lively heat, still to endure, And grew a seeting bath”
'Dateless' means without end or expiration — perpetual ('dateless night,' Richard II 1.3). 'Lively' means life-giving or animating, not merely cheerful. 'Seeting' is an old spelling of 'seething,' meaning boiling or bubbling. The cold spring, charged with Cupid's eternal fire, is permanently transformed into a hot, actively bubbling therapeutic bath.
TLN 2139archaic vocab
“a sad distemper'd guest”
'Distempered' means physically out of balance or disordered — sick in the humoral medical sense, where health depended on the correct proportion of the four bodily fluids. 'Sad' here means heavy or grave, not merely unhappy. The speaker goes to the bath as a clinically ill patient, casting love-sickness in the language of actual medicine.