Sonnet 75 Dissatisfaction Quotes

Have we said before that the opening of the poem is very pretty? We have. But you know what? Sometimes pretty isn't enough. When you actually think about them, these two lines already give hints of the speaker's coming dissatisfaction. What do food and rain have in common? For one thing, they're both necessary for life. That's check one in the pretty category. But they also both need to be continually replenished. There is no permanent meal or permanent rainfall that will leave a person or the ground satisfied for, well, life. That's check one in the discomforted uneasy dissatisfaction category.

How do we know that the speaker is going to end with dissatisfaction? Because his feelings towards his beloved seem so completely focused on achieving satisfaction. Isn't that what he means when he says that he wants to achieve "peace of you"? But how can you ever really have enough of a person you love? If the speaker were content to settle with a happy medium, he might not fall into such extreme despair. But by expecting to be completely satisfied with his beloved, doesn't he just set himself up for disappointment?

As we have talked about elsewhere on this module, these lines show how the speaker is bound to be dissatisfied. If his experience of being with his beloved leads to feelings of "pride," that means that he is already thinking about his relationship through the eyes of other people. And that line of thinking leads to the fear that they will take his beloved away from him.