The speaker isn’t describing a new romance — he’s talking to love itself as if it’s a living force that can grow tired. He worries that love’s energy might go blunt, so he urges it to behave more like hunger: appetite fades right after a meal, but by tomorrow it returns just as fierce. He wants love to have that same rhythm. Even when the lover’s eyes are completely satisfied today, he pleads, don’t let that fullness turn into a deadening habit. The poem then shifts into a quieter, more hopeful key. Time apart — the “sad interim” — becomes something positive, like an ocean separating two new lovers who visit the shore each day, making their reunion all the sweeter. Or it’s like winter, whose harshness makes us treasure summer three times more. The mood is intimate and slightly anxious, but ultimately it settles into a tender acceptance: absence, longing, and even dull patches aren’t enemies of love — they’re the very things that can sharpen its return.
Sonnet 56: Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said — Summary
Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said Thy edge should blunter be than appetite, Which but to-day by feeding is allay'd, To-morrow sharpened in his former might: So, love, be thou, although to-day thou fill Thy hungry eyes, even till they wink with fulness, To-morrow see again, and do not kill The spirit of love, with a perpetual dulness. Let this sad interim like the ocean be Which parts the shore, where two contracted new Come daily to the banks, that when they see Return of love, more blest may be the view; Or call it winter, which being full of care, Makes summer's welcome, thrice more wished, more rare.