Song Meaning
This isn't just a plea for a love song; it's a desperate attempt to overload the senses. The narrator begs for music, the "food of love," to be played relentlessly, hoping that an excess of it will ultimately kill the very appetite it’s meant to satisfy. It’s a paradoxical desire: to consume so much sweetness that it becomes sickening, leading to a kind of emotional death or numbness. The immediate shift from "play on" to "surfeiting" reveals a deep-seated pain the narrator is trying to escape, not indulge.
The core tension here lies in the narrator's struggle with an overwhelming and perhaps destructive passion. The music is initially described as a "sweet sound" that arrives like a natural, almost perfumed breath, evoking a serene image of violets. Yet, this beauty quickly turns sour. The narrator’s own perception of the music changes, noting, "'Tis not so sweet now as it was before." This suggests that the love itself, or the experience of it, has become tainted, making even its most beautiful expressions feel hollow or painful.
The lyrics masterfully employ the metaphor of consumption and satiety to describe the volatile nature of love and desire. The narrator’s spirit of love is described as vast as the sea, capable of receiving anything, yet everything that enters "falls into abatement and low price." This highlights how quickly intense feelings can lose their value or impact. The final lines, "so full of shapes is fancy / That it alone is high fantastical," point to the mind's own role in this emotional turmoil, suggesting that imagination and changeable desires are the true architects of this overwhelming, almost unreal, experience.
What makes these lyrics so potent is their raw depiction of a love that has become a source of suffering. The narrator isn't seeking comfort or joy; they are seeking an end to the pain through an extreme, almost masochistic, application of its perceived source. The writing captures the dizzying, self-destructive spiral of a heart overwhelmed by its own capacity for feeling, where the only perceived escape is to drown in the very thing that causes the ache.
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