Sonnet 56: Sweet Love, Renew Thy Force

Sonnet 56 is addressed not to the beloved but to love itself — a personified force the speaker is trying to talk back into strength.

Sonnet 56 (Full Poem)

Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but to-day by feeding is allay’d,
To-morrow sharpen’d in his former might:

So, love, be thou; although to-day thou fill
Thy hungry eyes even till they wink with fulness,
To-morrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love, with a perpetual dulness.

Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;

Or call it winter, which being full of care
Makes summer’s welcome thrice more wish’d, more rare.

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At a Glance

Here are the key facts about Sonnet 56 for quick reference.

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Why It Still Matters

The most common reading of Sonnet 56 treats it as a pleasant meditation on how absence sharpens desire — an early version of the familiar observation that longing makes love keener. That reading is not wrong, but it is more comfortable than the poem actually is.

The poem’s addressee is not the youth. It is love itself — a personified force that the speaker is trying to cajole, instruct, and persuade. “Sweet love, renew thy force” is not a declaration of feeling; it is an appeal to a feeling that has gone slack. The speaker is worried. Something has dulled. The edge of love has grown blunter than it should be, and the poem is his attempt to talk it back into sharpness.

This is an anxious poem wearing the clothes of a comfortable one. The ocean metaphor in the third quatrain — two newly betrothed lovers coming to opposite shores to watch for each other’s return — is an aspiration, not a description. The speaker is using an image of people whose separation is temporary and whose reunion is guaranteed to console himself about a situation whose terms are less certain. The image is chosen precisely because it is better than what he has.

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Key Themes

Sonnet 56 develops two related ideas across its three quatrains, and the relationship between them is what gives the poem its tension.

Love as Appetite. The first two quatrains build a sustained comparison between love and physical hunger. Appetite is always renewed — fed today, it sharpens again tomorrow with its original force. Love, the speaker argues, should work the same way. Even if today’s encounter fills the eyes “till they wink with fulness,” tomorrow should bring the same hunger back. The comparison is persuasive on its surface, but it carries an embedded anxiety: the speaker is making an argument he needs to be true. If he were confident that love renewed itself naturally, he would not need to make the argument at all. The appeal — “renew thy force,” “be thou” like appetite — is an instruction to something that is not currently doing what is asked of it.

Separation as Condition for Renewal. The third quatrain shifts from argument to metaphor, and the metaphor is aspirational. The “sad interim” — the speaker names it sad before trying to redescribe it as useful — is compared to an ocean separating newly betrothed lovers who come daily to opposite shores, watching for each other. The image is carefully chosen: these are people who have a formal commitment, a guaranteed return, a reunion that is not in doubt. The speaker is trying to reframe his own situation in those terms. If the interim is like that ocean, then what is on the other side is certain. The poem is working hard to convince itself of something it does not quite believe.

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Key Literary Devices

The poem’s devices are all in service of the same rhetorical project — persuading love to renew itself — and each one reveals a slightly different aspect of the speaker’s anxiety.

Apostrophe. The entire poem is addressed to “sweet love” — not to the beloved, not to the reader, but to love itself as an abstraction capable of receiving instruction. Apostrophe is the figure of speech for intense emotion directed at something that cannot literally hear it. It is the rhetoric of someone who has run out of more direct interlocutors. The speaker cannot appeal to the youth — he is absent, or distant, or the dulling of love is something the speaker cannot admit to the youth directly. Love becomes the addressee by default.

The Appetite Comparison. “Thy edge should blunter be than appetite” — the comparison between love and physical hunger is effective because appetite is understood to be self-renewing. It does not stay satisfied; it returns with its original force. But the comparison also implicitly reduces love to a bodily appetite, which is not obviously the elevation the speaker intends. Love that works like hunger is love that is fundamentally physical and cyclical — not the absolute, unchanging force of Sonnet 116. The comparison is pragmatic rather than idealising.

“Perpetual Dulness.” The phrase is the poem’s most revealing. Dulness is the thing the speaker fears — a love that has settled into comfortable habit, that no longer sharpens and returns. “Perpetual” makes it permanent: not a temporary dulling that will pass but a permanent condition of blunted feeling. This is what the speaker is trying to prevent, or reverse, or argue against. The phrase arrives in the second quatrain as the named danger, and everything else in the poem — the ocean, the winter, the summer — is offered as consolation or counter-argument against it.

“Sad Interim.” The phrase is honest in a way the poem might prefer not to be. The period of separation is sad. The speaker acknowledges this before trying to reframe it as useful — as the ocean that makes reunion sweeter, as the winter that makes summer welcome. The reframing is genuine enough, but “sad” comes first, and it names what the experience actually is before the consolation is applied.

The Winter-Summer Couplet. The closing couplet offers the most compressed version of the poem’s argument: winter makes summer more welcome, difficulty makes relief more sweet. The couplet is economical and emotionally true, but it is also the poem’s most conventional move. After the specificity of the ocean metaphor and the honesty of “sad interim,” the winter-summer comparison is almost a proverb. It resolves the poem, but it resolves it with something slightly less particular than what preceded it.

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Stanza by Stanza

Lines 1–4. The poem opens with an imperative directed at love itself: “renew thy force.” The force has not been renewed — that is the premise. The comparison that follows — love’s edge should not be blunter than appetite — establishes what love ought to be like by reference to what appetite is like. Hunger returns daily with its original strength. Love should do the same. “Which but to-day by feeding is allay’d, / To-morrow sharpen’d in his former might” — appetite satisfied today is re-sharpened tomorrow. The “former might” suggests that what is being described is a return to original strength, not an increase — the hope is simply for restoration, not improvement.

Lines 5–8. The second quatrain applies the first quatrain’s argument to love specifically. “So, love, be thou” — be like appetite, be renewable. Even if today’s encounter is complete and sating — “till they wink with fulness” — tomorrow should bring the same hunger back. The risk named is “a perpetual dulness” — the permanent loss of urgency that the speaker fears is either already happening or liable to happen. “Kill / The spirit of love” is the poem’s most dramatic phrase, placed at the line break where the enjambment draws it out: to kill the spirit of love through perpetual dulness is what the speaker is trying to prevent. The word “kill” is extreme — it reveals the stakes the speaker is placing on the question of whether love can renew itself.

Lines 9–12. The third quatrain reframes the separation — the “sad interim” the speaker is presumably experiencing — as potentially valuable rather than simply painful. The ocean between two shores creates the daily coming to the banks, the watching and waiting, that makes the eventual sight of the returning beloved more blessed. The specific image is of two people “contracted new” — newly betrothed, formally committed to each other, whose separation is therefore temporary and whose reunion is formal and certain. The speaker is using the best version of a separated couple — the one with a guarantee on the other side — to represent his own situation, which may not have that guarantee.

Lines 13–14. The couplet offers the seasonal analogy as the poem’s final argument. Winter makes summer welcome; difficulty makes return more rare and wished-for. The compression is effective, but the word “thrice” — “thrice more wish’d, more rare” — is doing a lot of work. The promise is not just that summer returns after winter but that it returns better, more welcome, more precious than it would have been without the winter’s difficulty. The speaker is making the strongest possible case for the value of what he is enduring.

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Analysis

Sonnet 56 is a poem about love’s vulnerability to familiarity, written by someone who is trying not to admit how vulnerable it feels. The surface argument — that separation sharpens desire, that love should renew itself like appetite — is reasonable enough, and the metaphors that support it are well-chosen. But the emotional texture of the poem is more anxious than its argument.

The apostrophe to love is the giveaway. The speaker is not addressing the youth, and the poem’s rhetorical energy is therefore directed not at a person who might respond but at an abstraction that cannot. This is the rhetoric of someone arguing with himself — trying to talk a feeling back into being by making the case for why it should exist in its renewed form. The argument is structured and careful, but its very carefulness reveals the anxiety. You do not need to argue for the renewal of something that is naturally renewing itself.

What sits in the middle of the poem — “this sad interim” — is the most honest moment. The speaker names it sad before immediately reaching for a metaphor that might make it useful. The ocean between the newly betrothed lovers is a beautiful and consoling image, but it is aspirational: it describes a separation with a guaranteed ending, which may not be what the speaker actually has. The winter-summer couplet closes the poem with the most conventional version of the same consolation. Everything in between is the speaker working out whether the consolation is available to him.

Read in the context of the Fair Youth sequence, Sonnet 56 sits in the part of the sequence where the relationship has become complicated — where absence, jealousy, and uncertainty have entered. The confident proclamations of Sonnets 18 and 55 are behind it. The poem is smaller than those, and more honest about what it costs to maintain love through difficulty.

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Related Sonnets

Three sonnets speak directly to the concerns of Sonnet 56.

Sonnet 29: The poem where the thought of the youth arrives unexpectedly to break a spiral of despair — love as rescue rather than as something that needs rescuing. Reading the two together shows the emotional range of the speaker’s relationship to love in the sequence: sometimes it saves him without effort; sometimes, as in Sonnet 56, he has to argue it back into existence.

Sonnet 75: The closest companion in theme — another poem about the oscillation between satisfaction and desire, between having and wanting, and the way love lives in that oscillation rather than in any settled state. Where Sonnet 56 addresses love as an abstraction, Sonnet 75 describes the experience from the inside.

Sonnet 116: The counterpoint — the poem that insists love does not alter, does not bend, does not dull. Where Sonnet 56 worries about love’s edge blunting and argues for renewal, Sonnet 116 declares that true love does not require renewal because it never diminishes. The two poems define the outer limits of the sequence’s thinking about love’s constancy.

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