What is the theme of sonnet 145 by Shakespeare?

Answer 1

Sonnet 145 is one of the stranger Shakespeare sonnets, not least because it is in Iambic Tetrameter (eight syllable lines) instead of the much commoner Iambic Pentameter (ten syllables).

The poem seems to tell the story of a spat between two lovers. She says: "I hate ...", he fears the worst, but then she lets him off the hook by saying "I hate not you." (we'd more likely say 'I don't hate you' in modern English.

The point of the poem is probably contained in the line:

'I hate' from hate away she threw.

In one theory, 'Hate away' in the English of Shakespeare's time would have sounded very similar to 'Hathaway'. Anne Hathaway was the maiden name of Shakespeare's wife.

On this basis, 145 looks like it might be a poem Shakespeare wrote when he was courting his future wife, probably about a quarrel they had which they later made up well enough for Anne to be already pregnant by the time the couple eventually married.

On the other hand, the postulated pun is not particularly good and the odds against the words "hate" and "away" coming together are not that remote, given their context. The theme and flow of the poem dictate that the punchline has to end with "not you" and this would have been the foundation stone in Shakespeare's construction of the final couplet. The penultimate line therefore has to rhyme with "you" as well as convey the sense that "hate" has been diffused.

Immediately, the poet would have been confronted with an acute shortage of amenable end words. Candidates include "blew", "threw", "drew" and "flew", all of which, however, are strongly associated with "away" in the necessary context of elimination or diffusion. "Hate" has to appear somewhere in the same line and there are then further poetic constraints which would tend to bring the two words together. With this perspective one might reasonably conclude that Shakespeare's inspiration for the poem had nothing to do with his wife.