The sonnet itself seems to be sexually ambiguous, there is no reference to gender, so one could argue that this sonnet is homoerotic or heterosexually based, but due to the couplet describing someone “.black as hell, as dark as night”, the general consensus is that this sonnet was written to or about the Dark Lady. A jolted lover is describing their inability to stop loving their mistress, who has not seemed to remain faithful. There’s an obvious sexual tone to the sonnet. Like many of the sonnets written by Shakespeare, sonnet 147 was written to or about the Dark Lady.
In the case of Sonnet 147 unhealthy "Feeding" and the healing of love "as a fever" brought on by fatal "Desire" which "Phisick did except", is seen in Psalm 147's "feeding the young ravens" (carrion feeding ravens, symbolic of Death) and in "medicine" for the "broken in heart" (see Psalm 147 verses 3 and 9). In the case of Sonnet 146 this influence is found in the vocative address to the "soul", in the synchronous correspondence of argument of Psalm and Sonnet relating to "Feeding" and in the remedying of ills. In fact, as to the image of "Feeding", Fred Blick has demonstrated that Sonnets 146 and 147 are influenced by the correspondingly numbered Psalms 146 and 147 and that they are designed as a pair. In Sonnet 147, the image of feeding changes from feeding death to feeding illness. The image of feeding within sonnet 147 is a continuation of imagery begun in sonnet 146. Towards the end of the sonnets, beginning at Sonnet 147, the speaker returns to his previously disturbed state. There are several theories as to who the Dark Lady actually is, if not a fictional character, however there is no substantial “proof” to allow these theories to be considered truth. Sonnet 147 is another turning point in which the speaker reverts back to anger towards the Dark Lady. In the second grouping of sonnets in which sonnet 147 falls, the speaker’s feelings toward to dark lady change several times. These sonnets, unlike the sonnets which refer to the young man, are typically angrier and are usually referring to either the Dark Lady specifically, her relationship with the speaker, or the love triangle between the speaker, the Dark Lady, and her additional lovers. It falls towards the end of the Dark Lady sequence. Parsed against these contexts, sonnet 147 emerges as a narrative in which the speaker begins by confronting his carnality and ends by asserting the role of language in counteracting that carnality, when he swears that the dark lady is "fair." Bolstering this reading with the work of other authors such as Montaigne and Donne, the article suggests that Shakespeare's poem participates in a wider cultural negotiation in which a deepening interest in the materiality of the body spurs the need to reaffirm the fiction of selfhood in newly self-conscious ways.Sonnet 147 falls in the realm of the Dark Lady sonnets (Sonnets 127-154). The choice of fever is highly significant in this light, for this complex ailment was associated with Lucretian notions about the permeability of the body and the materiality of the soul. The discussion is framed using Shakespeare's sonnet 147, "My love is as a fever," which exposes the discrepancy between the self and the body-that is, between poetic representation and the underlying material world made up of particles. This article considers how changes in early modern medical discourse and materialist philosophy influenced conceptions of subjectivity in Renaissance literature.