Shakespeare's insomnia sonnet: the body rests, the mind goes travelling
Exhausted from a journey, Shakespeare's speaker finally reaches bed, and that is exactly when the real trip begins. His thoughts set off on a pilgrimage to an absent beloved, holding his eyes open in the dark until an imagined face glows like a jewel. Rest never arrives, by day or night.
Sonnet 27 is built on a neat reversal. The first line gives us a traveller worn out by the road, hurrying to lie down, but once the limbs stop working the mind clocks on. Its journey is described in the language of devotion: a zealous pilgrimage toward someone far away. The labour has not ended; it has merely changed shifts from body to brain.
The middle lines play with sight and blindness. The speaker stares into a darkness of the kind the blind see, yet his soul's imagination supplies a picture anyway: the beloved's shadow, projected onto eyes that cannot actually see it. Shakespeare then compares that image to a jewel hanging in a frightening night, one that makes the blackness beautiful and makes old night's face look young again.
The closing couplet sums up the bargain without comfort: "Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind, / For thee, and for myself, no quiet find." Love here is a kind of sleeplessness, and the speaker cannot tell whether the trouble is for the beloved's sake or his own. The idea of a restless night continues into the following sonnet in the sequence.
The poem is one of 154 sonnets Shakespeare left, alongside some 39 plays and three long narrative poems. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised on 26 April 1564, he probably studied Latin authors at the town's free grammar school. After his twins were born in 1585 he all but vanishes from surviving documents until he surfaces in London's theatre world in 1592. Stories invented to fill those lost years, such as flight from a deer-poaching charge or work minding theatregoers' horses, rest on little beyond hearsay gathered after his death.
Source: Sonnet 27: Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed
