Sonnet 45

Love from Afar

1 The other two, slight air, and purging fire
2 Are both with thee, wherever I abide;
3 The first my thought, the other my desire,
4 These present-absent with swift motion slide.
5 For when these quicker elements are gone
6 In tender embassy of love to thee,
7 My life, being made of four, with two alone
8 Sinks down to death, oppress'd with melancholy;
9 Until life's composition be recur'd
10 By those swift messengers return'd from thee,
11 Who even but now come back again, assur'd,
12 Of thy fair health, recounting it to me:
13 This told, I joy; but then no longer glad,
14 I send them back again, and straight grow sad.

Notes

TLN 617cultural context
“slight air, and purging fire”
In Elizabethan natural philosophy, all matter was composed of four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Fire and air were the 'lighter' (less dense) elements that rose upward, while earth and water were heavy and sank. 'Slight' here means thin or insubstantial; 'purging' describes fire's power to refine and cleanse, burning off impurities.
TLN 621archaic vocab
“these quicker elements are gone In tender embassy of love”
'Quicker' means swifter but also more alive — air and fire were the life-sustaining elements. 'Embassy' is a diplomatic mission: an ambassador sent from one court to another to carry messages. The poet figures his thought and desire as official messengers dispatched to the beloved's presence.
TLN 623cultural context
“My life, being made of four, with two alone Sinks down to death, oppress'd with melancholy”
Elizabethan medicine taught that a healthy person required a balanced mixture of all four elements. When the two light elements (air and fire) depart from the speaker, only the heavy pair (earth and water) remain. Earth and water together produced black bile, which caused melancholy — the humor associated with heaviness, sadness, and physical decline. The speaker is literally dying of an elemental imbalance.
historical Melancholy and the malcontent
TLN 625archaic vocab
“life's composition be recur'd By those swift messengers”
'Recur'd' means restored to health or cured again — brought back to the proper balanced state. 'Life's composition' is the correct mixture of all four elements that constitutes a living, healthy person. When the messengers return with news of the beloved, the body's elemental balance is re-established and the speaker revives.
TLN 629rhetorical device
“This told, I joy; but then no longer glad, I send them back again, and straight grow sad”
The closing couplet is the sonnet's volta (turn): instead of resolving the grief of absence, it traps the speaker in a perpetual loop. Joy at the news of the beloved's health immediately re-dispatches thought and desire back to him, which instantly recreates the emptiness and sadness. The poem offers no consolation, only the endless turning of the cycle.
historical The sonnet form