Sonnet 154

The Dark Lady: Reckoning

1 The little Love-god lying once asleep,
2 Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,
3 Whilst many nymphs that vow'd chaste life to keep
4 Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand
5 The fairest votary took up that fire
6 Which many legions of true hearts had warm'd;
7 And so the general of hot desire
8 Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarm'd.
9 This brand she quenched in a cool well by,
10 Which from Love's fire took heat perpetual,
11 Growing a bath and healthful remedy,
12 For men diseas'd; but I, my mistress' thrall,
13 Came there for cure and this by that I prove,
14 Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.

Notes

TLN 2148rhetorical device
“the general of hot desire / Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarm'd”
Cupid is called 'the general of hot desire' — a military metaphor casting him as the commander-in-chief of erotic longing, his torch the weapon of his whole army. 'Disarm'd' extends the conceit: the god who sets the world ablaze is caught asleep and stripped of his weapon by a single unarmed girl. The humor turns on the bathos — the invincible commander undone by an unguarded nap.
TLN 2150historical topical
“This brand she quenched in a cool well by, / Which from Love's fire took heat perpetual, / Growing a bath and healthful remedy”
When the votary quenches Cupid's torch in the well, it transforms the water into a perpetually hot therapeutic spring. This maps onto the Elizabethan fashion for medicinal thermal baths: spas at Bath (Aquae Sulis) and Buxton were popular resorts where wealthy patients 'took the waters' as cures for fever, gout, and other ailments. The speaker comes there as a patient — and finds the waters useless against the fever of love.
TLN 2153archaic vocab
“I, my mistress' thrall”
'Thrall' means a slave or bondsman — a person held entirely in servitude to another's will. To be a 'thrall' to one's mistress is the standard conceit of Petrarchan love poetry: the lover's will is so completely conquered by desire that he becomes her captive. The speaker calls himself this even as he admits the bath (Cupid's cure for the diseased) has not worked for him.
historical Petrarch and the Petrarchan lover
TLN 2155rhetorical device
“Love's fire heats water, water cools not love”
The closing line is a chiasmus — a rhetorical figure that reverses the order of paired terms (fire/water then water/love) to make a paradox. Love can transform the world (it heats even cold water into a hot spring) but the world cannot transform love (water, however hot, cools not the lover). It is simultaneously the poem's logical conclusion and its joke: the cure built from love's own heat is the one thing that cannot cure love.
historical The sonnet form