Sonnet 114: Or Whether Doth My Mind, Being Crowned With You

SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived

With his curiously cryptic Sonnet 114, William Shakespeare poses a rhetorical question to his younger lover, asking whether his experience of seeing him in everything he looks at is down simply to his eye flattering him, or to his eye having acquired the ancient mystical art of alchemy and actually turning even ugly creatures into beautiful angelic beings just such as the young man himself.

He then also settles the matter emphatically and declares without reservation that it is indeed flattery on the eye's part that has this effect on him, but that any sin the mind may be committing in lapping it all up is mitigated by the fact that the eye too loves what it wants to see – the young man's beauty – and so willingly tastes of this flattering, though therefore potentially poisonous, potion first, before passing it on for the mind to metaphorically imbibe.