Sonnet 119

Farewell to the Fair Youth

1 What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
2 Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within,
3 Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
4 Still losing when I saw myself to win!
5 What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
6 Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!
7 How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,
8 In the distraction of this madding fever!
9 O benefit of ill! now I find true
10 That better is, by evil still made better;
11 And ruin'd love, when it is built anew,
12 Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
13 So I return rebuk'd to my content,
14 And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.

Notes

TLN 1654classical allusion
“potions have I drunk of Siren tears”
The Sirens of Greek myth were creatures whose singing was so beautiful it lured sailors onto the rocks and to their deaths. Here the poet calls his destructive infatuation a kind of potion he drank, brewed from the Sirens weeping: tears that look mournful and genuine but are in fact deadly bait.
TLN 1655archaic vocab
“Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within”
A limbeck (also spelled alembic) is a vessel used in alchemy and early chemistry to distil liquids: the substance is heated in one flask, the vapor rises through a bent tube, and the purified or concentrated liquid drips out the other end. The poet extends the Siren image: those tears are not raw emotion but something processed and concentrated from a corrupt inner source, so what looks pure on the surface has been distilled from something rotten inside.
TLN 1660cultural context
“mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted”
In the astronomy accepted in Shakespeare England, every celestial body moved through the heavens inside its own hollow crystalline sphere, a rotating transparent globe centered on the earth. The eyes were compared to small planets moving inside their own rounded sockets. To have eyes out of their spheres means to be so overwhelmed by shock or madness that the eyes seem to have been shaken from their proper orbits, an image of total psychological dislocation.
TLN 1661archaic vocab
“distraction of this madding fever”
Madding is an adjective meaning causing madness or maddening, not mad itself. A madding fever is a fever that drives a person out of their mind, a feverish frenzy that is the cause of the distraction rather than its result. Thomas Gray later phrase the madding crowd preserves the same meaning. The speaker treats his infatuation not as a deliberate choice but as a disease, something that happened to him and robbed him of his senses.
TLN 1667rhetorical device
“gain by ill thrice more than I have spent”
The couplet closes the sonnet in the language of commercial accounting. Spent means money or emotional capital paid out; gain means profit returned; thrice more is a three-fold return on investment. The speaker counts himself richer for having strayed: the infatuation cost him something, but the renewed and fortified love he has come back to is worth three times what he lost. Content means the state of being satisfied or at peace with what one has. Rebukd means rebuked or chastened; he returns corrected by experience, not triumphant.