Sonnet 75 Suffering Quotes

Same idea once again: just like Mick Jagger, the speaker can't get no satisfaction. Unlike Mick Jagger, though, the speaker doesn't have legions of screaming groupies climbing over each other to hurl themselves at him. That's a surefire recipe for suffering if we've ever seen one.

These lines seem to reveal the root causes of the rest of the speaker's suffering. That's because they make it sound like the speaker's relationship with his beloved isn't all that loving after all. Of course, the fact that the other person doesn't necessarily love the speaker back would probably cause enough suffering on its own. But maybe it's part of Shakespeare's insight into human nature to point out how that little beginning can balloon into a whole host of other problems, just because the speaker can't face the facts. Does that seem like a fair interpretation of the poem to you? Does it seem true to life?

These lines sum up the suffering of the speaker. Caught between the painful extremes of an empty stomach and a bloated one, he can't ever be satisfied. Did you notice the weird grammar of the last line, which forces you to supply some missing words (at the very least, you've got to understand it as saying "Either gluttoning on all, or [with] all away")? Could this breakdown in ordinary language be Shakespeare's way of acting out, in language, the suffering that the speaker is experiencing?