The speaker is describing how he has been affected by his relationship with the dark lady. Because their love is one of a purely sexual nature, the “rise” refers to the poet’s erection, symbolizing the shallowness of relationships of the flesh. The “fall” refers to the “nobler” relationships of the mind and soul. Because the speaker’s body has betrayed his soul, he has fallen into a place of darkness and confusion.

Sonnet 151 compares the noble love of the soul with the lust of the flesh. The speaker values the love from the soul as “nobler,” however, due to the lady’s seduction, the speaker has fallen victim to the “treason of the body”—sex and lust. His “gross body” betrays the soul by being “contented” by the dark lady. He uses these comparisons as a condemnation of bodily desire. In the speaker’s eyes, a true love is one of the soul, not the flesh.

In this final couplet, the speaker is both begging for attention and admitting his own flaws. He states that because he loves the dark lady’s flaws—her “unworthiness”—then he is all the more deserving of her reciprocated affection. However, this couplet can also be read as the speaker’s own self-deprecation. If his perception is so warped and if he finds her flaws attractive, then perhaps the dark lady is the only love worth having.

The noun “warrantise," a word that’s largely been eliminated from contemporary vocabulary, is the state of being guaranteed. Here, it refers to the skill with which the speaker’s lover acts.

This line demonstrates the power of beauty to deceive. The speaker has been so manipulated that he is unable to use his true senses. Here, it is not love creating the veil over the speaker’s eyes, but the speaker’s own dishonesty. He is able to see all the dark lady’s flaws, but her beauty has made it impossible for the speaker to be honest with himself. The speaker is in total denial of his situation.

Throughout Sonnet 150, there is a clear hierarchical power structure between the two lovers. This hierarchy is seen most clearly in the use of the words “worship” and “command.” The speaker sees his lover as a sort of goddess or queen—someone to be worshipped and deified. He uses all his energy and willpower to praise even the worst aspects of her character. And she responds by exerting more power over him. The speaker is under the dark lady’s full control. There is also a vast difference in the amount of effort put into the relationship by the two characters. Where the speaker invests “all [his] best” in her “defects,” the dark lady responds with continued hate and oppression.

This sonnet provides insight into the characters of the speaker and the dark lady. She has manipulated him so greatly that he will defend her before himself. Her cruelty is embodied by her lack of reciprocation. Although addressing the dark lady, the speaker never explicitly says who he’s addressing, referring to her as “cruel,” “tyrant” or, finally, “love.” The choice to use these words instead of a more specific address connects to the theme of the cruel and manipulative nature of love. The speaker’s anger toward the dark lady is one and the same with his anger toward Love.

The speaker states that he would be able to see his lover’s faults were it not for the deceptive power of love. As usual, he is fully aware of the deception working upon him. He acknowledges the “tears” that “keep’st me blind.” The tears act as a screen through which the speaker is forced to see his lover. Other than masking the “foul faults” of his lover, the speaker offers no other purpose for the deception. The speaker is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the idea of love and increasingly aware of the power it has over him.

Sonnet 148 is primarily about the deceptive power of love. The speaker confesses his confusion regarding public opinions about the dark lady, which clash with his own views. Because his love has made him blind to the faults of the dark lady, the speaker is unable to see her the way that the rest of the world sees her. However, the use of “true” indicates that the speaker knows that his perception is being manipulated. The speaker is aware of the manipulation and deceit, but powerless against it.

This sonnet ends with a spiteful couplet that expresses one of the larger themes of the dark lady series. The deceptive beauty of the dark lady has corrupted not only the speaker, but also his perception of love. What once was full of joy is now “black as hell, and dark as night.” The speaker’s beliefs about the power of love in this sonnet are completely different from his initial, more optimistic beliefs at the start of the collection of sonnets. In the hands of the dark lady, love has turned into a deceptive and corruptive force, something to be scorned rather than celebrated.

In Sonnet 147 the speaker explains the extent to which the dark lady has ruined his life. Using medical metaphors—likening his “love” and “reason” to “a fever” and “the physician,” respectively—he acknowledges that his desire has brought him to a place from which there is no return. His reason and logic, which have thus far kept his desires from consuming him, fail at their duty. The metaphor that “desire is death” is complicated. It can be read as a condemnation of desire, playing on the theme that desire and lust lead to one’s downfall. However, considering the medical conceit of this sonnet, “desire is death” could also be a final diagnosis. Where reason is the physician and love is the illness, unrestrained desire is the illness gone to its fullest and most lethal stage.

Sonnet 154 is the final poem in Shakespeare’s sequence and is nearly identical to Sonnet 153 in theme and narrative. The “little Love-god” who loses his “brand” to a virginal nymph is the Roman love god Cupid, who loses his brand to one of Diana’s maidens in the prior poem. Once again, the nymph plunges the brand into “a cool well,” producing a healing bath warmed by “Love’s fire.” The conclusion is also familiar. The speaker comes to the bath to be cured of his immense, sickening desire for his mistress. He finds no cure there, learning that while “Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.” The moral of Sonnet 154 serves as a fitting final note to Shakespeare’s entire sequence of tumultuous love poems: there is no cure for the painful passions of eros.

Sonnets 153 and 154 bear no narrative relation to the rest of the sequence. Their inclusion and placement in the sequence was the choice of Thomas Thorpe, who compiled and published the collection. These final two sonnets are written in a mode popular in Shakespeare’s time: lively meditations built on tales from classical mythology. In Sonnet 153, the octave tells a story about Cupid, the Roman god of love and lust. Cupid falls asleep and has his “brand”—the arrow that sparks human desire—stolen by one of Diana’s nymphs, who plunges it into a “cold valley-fountain.” The valley spring, charged with “lively heat,” becomes a healing place for men afflicted with “strange maladies.” In the sestet, the speaker claims that the spring cannot cure his love-sickness, only a gaze from the very source of his woes—“my mistress’ eyes.”

chThe sonnet’s sestet, the six lines following the volta, trace the speaker’s process of disillusionment with the dark lady. The speaker has placed great faith in the dark lady’s many oaths and promises—“of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy.” The speaker uses the metaphors of vision and perjury to figure the decay of these oaths. The speaker claims to have “enlighten[ed]” the dark lady, making his eyes “swear against the thing they see” and seeing her as better than she really is. In the final couplet, the speaker claims to have committed perjury—testifying against the truth—by having “sworn thee fair.” Thus the dark lady sonnets end: not in resolution and appreciation, but bitterness and disenchantment.

The conceit of angels and devils guiding humans in opposing moral directions originated during the 1st century CE. The playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, employs the same conceit in his 1593 tragedy Doctor Faustus. In Sonnet 144, the fair youth is the angel, a being of purity and comfort. The dark lady is the “worser spirit,” who is so seductive that she has not only tempted the speaker to sin, but is now tempting his “angel” as well. Note that the battle between the angel and the devil plays out as the speaker watches on the sidelines. He has already been condemned to hell in the afterlife for lusting after the “female evil.” Now he is condemned to hell on earth since he has been abandoned by both of his loves.

In Sonnet 152, the final sonnet of the dark lady sequence, the speaker accuses the dark lady of being unfaithful and turning against their shared love. While the speaker admits he has “forsworn,” or renounced, loving the dark lady, he claims that she has committed two such forswearances. Not only has she ceased to love the speaker, she has also “thy bed-vow broke”—she has broken their vow of fidelity. In the second stanza, the speaker pivots in his perspective. He admits to having broken twenty oaths, and so he recognizes the hypocrisy in accusing the dark lady “of two oaths’ breach.” It is a recognition of mutual wrongdoing, for the speaker acknowledges both the wretchedness of his own oaths—which are “but to misuse thee”—and of those of the dark lady—“all my honest faith in thee is lost.”

After the volta, the speaker develops a solution to the soul’s problem. Acknowledging the inevitable decay of the body—the “servant’s loss”—the speaker encourages his soul to transform physical loss into spiritual growth, to “within be fed.” In the final couplet, the speaker seeks to transform Death itself in this ravening, expansive process of soul. The logic is strange but coherent: if the soul feeds on decay, then it may “feed on Death”; if the soul continues to do so, Death itself will eventually die, at which point “there’s no more dying.” As a result, the soul’s problem is seemingly solved, allowing it to make a claim on eternity.

Sonnet 146 opens with the poet addressing his soul, asking it a series of questions about why it pursues earthly pleasures rather than caring for its own purity. The sonnet develops an extended metaphor of the body as a mansion, which the soul has “so short a lease” on. Rather than focusing on the state of the soul that lives within the mansion, the speaker has spent “so large [a] cost” on painting the outside and excessively indulging in physical pleasures. The body is on “lease” from Nature, but the soul is eternal, so the speaker beseeches his soul to take the wealth that has been spent on the body and instead store it “within,” so that the soul can “be fed.”

Many scholars have theorized that Sonnet 145 is not written to the dark lady. Because of its anomalous meter and lack of relevance to the surrounding sonnets, Critic Andrew Gurr has postulated that Sonnet 145 was written by a young Shakespeare to his wife, Anne Hathaway. According to Gurr, the Early Modern pronunciation of the phrase “hate away” would have been almost identical to “Hathaway,” and the phrase “And sav’d my life” would have sounded like “Anne saved my life.” Critics who have adopted Gurr’s theory speculate that Sonnet 145 was written in Shakespeare's youth and included in the sequence by the publisher Thomas Thorpe, which accounts for the divergence in style. Other critics have proposed alternative theories, with some claiming that Sonnet 145 was written in an effort to lighten the mood, while others posit that Shakespeare did not write the sonnet at all.
ANDREW GURR; Shakespeare's First Poem: Sonnet 145, Essays in Criticism, Volume XXI, Issue 3, 1 April 1971, Pages 221–226.

Sonnet 145 is the only one of the entire sequence not written in iambic pentameter. Instead it takes up iambic tetrameter. The shorter meter contributes to a lighter mood, with the tone shifting away from the heavier considerations of Sonnet 144 in lieu of presenting a more gentle, almost comic, interaction between lovers. The dark lady begins by saying “‘I hate,’” but upon seeing the anguish it causes for the speaker, amends her statement to “‘I hate[…] not you.’” That this resolution arrives at the end of the final couplet allows the suspense of the speaker’s distress to encompass the entire poem. The exchange ultimately comes across as playful in its treatment of the lady’s statement, conjuring associations with the feigned hatred that chaste maidens were supposed to show for their amorous suitors before ultimately giving in to their advances.

At the root of the speaker’s conflict are the contrasting types of love he has for the fair youth and the dark lady. His love for the youth is emotional and selfless, sometimes verging on idolatry. In contrast, the speaker’s love for the dark lady is sensual and shameful, built on lust. In light of this, the first quatrain of Sonnet 144 can be read in two different ways. By one interpretation, the “better angel,” the fair youth, gives comfort while the “worser spirit,” the dark lady, gives despair. However, this line can also be read as saying that both of the speaker’s loves give him comfort and despair, a reading supported by his tortured reactions to the infidelity of both of his lovers.

Sonnet 143 employs an extended simile that compares the dark lady’s neglect of the speaker in favor of pursuing other men to a housewife’s neglect of her baby in favor of pursuing a runaway chicken. The implication is that, rather than spend time nurturing their relationship, she is chasing after other men. However, it also portrays the speaker in a rather pitiful light. He urges the lady to “play the mother’s part,” casting himself as a man who is needy and dependent on the dark lady for maternal affection. The closing couplet concedes that even if she must chase after other men, the speaker hopes that she will return to him when she is through.

Notice the contrasts established between “loving sin” and “virtu[ous] hate.” The nature of love is a common theme in the sonnet tradition, which abounds with frustrated lovers bemoaning their lack of physical satisfaction. Typically, passionate speakers begin sonnets by expressing their devotion for their beloveds, only to be rebuffed in the name of virtue. The cold, beautiful beloveds were considered hateful for their chastity. The speaker parodies this tradition by casting the dark lady in the role of the chaste maiden who virtuously rejects her suitor. The inaccuracy of the comparison is cemented as the speaker accuses the dark lady of hypocrisy, telling her that they are both lustful adulterers and that his love for her is no less “lawful” than her “false bonds of love.” He urges her to take “pity” on him, emotionally and sexually, lest she end up alone and rejected by her other lovers.

On the surface, the final line of Sonnet 141 refers tothe lady’s rejections and infidelities, which cause the speaker “pain” because he loves her. However, the use of the phrase “awards me pain” adds a potential religious context. It is a common conceit in the sonnet tradition for love to considered “sinful,” since it encourages amorous and unchaste thoughts. In orthodox Christian doctrine, sins needed to be confessed and repented. Though uncommon in practice, pain, whether self-inflicted or administered by others, was considered a way in which sinners could pay penance. By the logic of penance, the “pain” the dark lady “awards” becomes the speaker’s “gain.”

Sonnet 141 reprises the sentiments of Sonnet 130, exploring the sensory experience of the dark lady. The ongoing conflict between the eyes and the heart continues, with the other senses joining the argument as well.The use of anaphora in lines 5-7 serves to emphasize that the dark lady is not pleasing to any of the speaker’s senses through the repetition of the negative conjunction “nor.” However, neither the speaker’s “five wits” nor his “five senses” can dissuade his “foolish heart” from loving her anyways. Love, the “blind fool,” has also proved itself deaf and otherwise insensate.