A frustrated lover confronts his beloved about her mixed signals. She once promised to love him, but now she takes it back—though she won’t exactly hate him either. The speaker runs through the possibilities with a growing sense of exasperation: if not love or hate, then what? Some careful middle ground? Loving and hating at once? None of it makes sense, and his tone teeters between genuine confusion and a sharp, knowing mockery. Then, in a flash, he catches on. Her refusal to commit, her back-and-forth, is a deliberate trick. What she calls hate is really a twisted form of love, a way to keep him hooked. The mood is witty and a little weary, capturing the push-and-pull of a romance where one person holds all the strings. It’s the sound of someone seeing through a game but still half-caught in it.
Sonnet XIX: You Cannot Love — Summary
To Humor
You cannot love, my pretty heart, and why? There was a time you told me that you would; But now again you will the same deny, If it might please you, would to God you could. What, will you hate? Nay, that you will not, neither. Nor love nor hate, how then? What will you do? What, will you keep a mean then betwixt either, Or will you love me and yet hate me, too? Yet serves this not. What next? What other shift? You will, and will not; what a coil is here. I see your craft, now I perceive your drift, And all this while I was mistaken there; Your love and hate is this, I now do prove you: You love in hate, by hate to make me love you.