Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair is the first line of the Sonnet 144 by the great English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
Sonnet 144 was first published in 1599, in a collection of love poems entitled The Passionate Pilgrim. Although the book attributed all 20 poems in the collection to Shakespeare, he actually wrote only 2. The collected sonnets of Shakespeare were printed in 1609, when the poet was already a well-established playwright. No one knows when Shakespeare wrote the poems, but he probably composed them over several years. Shakespeare wrote a sequence of 154, though some scholars believe that a different author wrote Sonnets 153 and 154, those focused on Cupid, the Roman god of love.
Like almost all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sonnet 144 consists of three quatrains (four-line units) followed by a concluding couplet (two-line unit). Each quatrain has a rhyme scheme of abab, cdcd, efef, with the final couplet a rhyming one (gg).
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still; The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. To win me soon to hell, my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side, And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, Wooing his purity with her foul pride. And whether that my angel be turned fiend Suspect I may, yet not directly tell; But being both from me, both to each friend, I guess one angel in another’s hell. Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
This sonnet belongs to a group of sonnets in the sequence (numbers 127 to 154) known as the “dark lady” sonnets. The dark lady is an unknown woman with dark hair and features, with whom the poet has become reluctantly involved. Many of the dark lady sonnets express bitterness and resentment about the nature of their relationship. Occasionally, the dark lady is contrasted with the “fair youth” of sonnets 1 to 127, a young nobleman whose friendship the poet treasures. Some critics have suggested that the fair youth represents spiritual love, while the dark lady represents physical passion.
In Sonnet 144, the themes of the dark lady and fair youth converge. The poet’s “loves” are both the people themselves and the type of love they represent. The speaker is an anguished figure in the middle, torn between the comfort and despair that each symbolizes.
The imagery of good and bad angels tempting the soul was familiar in Shakespeare’s time. Much literature of the day reflected religious imagery from medieval art and drama. Another playwright of Shakespeare’s time, Christopher Marlowe, depicted the struggle of good and evil spirits in the play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (about 1588). But where the bad angel traditionally struggles for the soul of the poet, Shakespeare’s dark spirit struggles for his friend. The poet’s own “hell” is the despair of seeing his better angel “corrupt[ed]” by his rival.
Much of the imagery in Sonnet 144 has sexual undertones. The temptation of the dark angel is obviously sensual; her “foul pride” refers to her sexual allure. The corruption that would turn the youth from angel to “fiend” is a physical relationship with the lady. In the simplest terms, the poet suspects an affair between his two friends. He is thus in an agony of jealousy and suspicion. But worse than this, he fears the irreversible tainting of his fair friend. “I guess one angel in another’s hell,” he concludes. In Elizabethan times, “hell” was a slang word for a woman’s sex organs. Thus the poet imagines both the physical and the moral aspects of the betrayal. The hell he pictures is both the sexual act and the moral collapse into misery and evil.
The final couplet describes the poet’s anguish in “never know[ing]” for certain whether his suspicions are justified. He concludes that he shall live in doubt “Till my bad angel fire my good one out.” On one level, this conclusion refers to the time when the dark lady ends the relationship. But, in another reference to Elizabethan slang, the poet also hints at sexually transmitted disease in the reference to “fire.” This is a crude and unpleasant image with which to conclude the sonnet. But for Shakespeare it serves as an appropriate image for the corruption represented by the dark lady. The purest love portrayed in the sonnets is a spiritual love that has never resulted in sexual intercourse. The degradation of lust is “hell,” in all senses of the word.
For more information about Shakespeare’s sonnets, see Shakespeare, William (Shakespeare’s poems). See also English literature (Elizabethan poetry); Poetry (Forms) (Renaissance poetry).
