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Sonnet CXXIX |
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| Th'expense of spirit | This sonnet might usefully be compared to 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds'. Both appear to be poems of impersonal, objective definition: the one of Love; this one, a sort of companion piece, of Lust. Love is defined in its Platonic form as unchanging, fixed, spiritual, Ideal; Lust is the contrary: changing, unfixed, physical, earthly. But both are poems which attempt an 'impersonal' tone in order to be (self) persuasive. They try to state merely what the actual case is - but each contains its own drama: the effort of the voice in the poem to really believe this and to act on this belief. | |
| waste of shame | The first line sets up an
absolute opposition: spirit/body (honour/shame) (spending(wasting)/saving).
Would it be any different if the line was written: 'Lust is the expense of spirit in a waste of shame'? I think so: this form of definition: 'X is...' is a definition in the form of description - and there are always alternative definitions - X is A, and X is B, X is C...and so on. The reversal of the form of the line suggests that 'A is X, and that's all there is to it', a first move in the poem to convince that this really is all there is to Lust. That this effort to convince is both necessary and an inevitable failure will become the final point of the poem in its last couplet. 'waste' here means primarily desert, but it is also shadowed by waist. With the first meaning, the line becomes something like the pouring away of a liquid into desert sands (and spending from expense is an Elizabethan word for the act of ejaculation). Waist then is the physical site of that wasteful action. The line, so apparently abstract and ethical in its focus, is shadowed by a kind of physical memory of what it is about - it's a sort of 'morning after' poem - which also suggests how its attempt at impersonal objectivity (there's no use of 'I' or clear reference to particular, personal experience) is haunted by personal reference. 'shame' is both an attribute of that particular waste/waist , and of the male voice's actions. |
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| action | As I said, this is a sort of
'morning after' poem: its effort is to read back in time its feelings now;
to replace what it actually felt like then with what you now
know it to have really been -to estimate it, not in terms of
experience (senses/feeling), but in terms of value (ethical judgment).
'lust in action' really was this (an expense of spirit..) - whatever it
might have felt like at the time, and the feeling before that lust was
enacted is now also going to be redefined. But this attempt to redefine
feelings after the event is going to prove the problem in the poem
- and some of the strain involved becomes apparent in the next two lines.
The line uses the rhetorical form of phrasing called chiasmus - that is, where the order of terms is repeated, but reversed (lust/action: action/lust). This form will be used throughout the poem, fitting in with its effort to reverse attitudes, to re-define an experience, re-view its subject. But there is something counter-productive in the overuse of rhetorical forms: rather than being effectively persuasive, the effect becomes to notice the effort to persuade. |
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| perjured | That effort becomes apparent in all this piling up of adjectives. Each one is hammering home the poem's view of lust - but the piling up is excessive (across two lines, with terms redundantly repeating the same idea - murd'rous, bloody.....cruel..with a kind of weak ending suggesting a kind of exhaustion: not to trust. (Can you imagine saying about somebody that he's a murderer, and, what's more, you can't trust him?) The poem has moved from the certain tone of the first line to a more obviously pressurised tone of persuasion. | |
| enjoyed | This line asserts how quickly in experience one feeling will be replaced by another, more ethically-informed feeling. 'no sooner' and straight repeat the same idea of instant transformation - and the reversal is simple and absolute: enjoyed/despised. | |
| past reason hunted | The focus again shifts to the till action perspective, employing a comparison to hunting - with the man as the pursuer. | |
| swallowed bait | But the image now flips round - it is the animal hunted which might be trapped using bait. Not only has the feeling flipped round: hunted (desired)/hated - but the man's whole sense of what the game is will reverse; he is not the pursuer but the pursued, and entrapped. (There's a good deal of male sexual fear in this poem - consistent with many traditional Church sermons on desirable Eve who entices/weakens/traps foolish Adam.) | |
| mad | Developing on from the twice repeated past reason - but adding to the force of that phrase, hammering it home. Past reason can merely mean without sufficient or good reason to indulge in this behaviour - but now the consequence of acting without reason is emphasized: it is to be mad. But mad isn't just to be without (good) reason, it is to be uncontrolled, unconstrained in action. Contrast this to the view of true Love in 'Let me not..'. There, it is a defining quality of action that it be without movement - something fixed. Lust, by contrast, is all action - both physical and changeable - whether it be in the pursuit or in possession, whether in the emotional volatility of desires or the physical energy expended in the act. | |
| extreme | Extreme in the sense of beyond: beyond reason, beyond (social) constraint (perjured, murderous...), but also in the sense of violent effects/actions - a thrashing about, whereas what is good is defined by its certainty and calm. Something noble is recognised by its being imperturbable, its lack of action. (That this set of values has had a long life can be seen from the labeling of the gases Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and Radon as the 'noble' or 'inert' gases in the Periodic Table - as they tend not to interfere in any chemical reaction or combine with other elements) | |
| bliss |
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| dream | In the line and context this has to be taken negatively: its primary meaning is of dream-as-illusion. But, nevertheless, because of its potential connotations of something desirable, it seems a weak word to place in apposition to a joy proposed - the contrast is muted, slightly blurred - and especially so given that it is the last term in the poem-as-argument which has thrown terms like murderous, savage, mad at Lust. | |
| all this | The opening of the concluding couplet might
sound confident enough: all that the poem has strained to say is already
known - what need is there for argument? It is a certainty that the
poem is right.
But - most of the use of chiasmus in the poem has underlined the reversal: before/after, but now 'the world well knows / none knows well underlines how little effect the argument of the poem/ (ethical) knowledge has on behaviour and action. The redefinitions of experience don't stick - or not long enough to prevent action. |
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| shun | shun through its sound suggests what should be the attitude to that action (ak-shun) opening the poem in line two. But, of course, this argument, known to everyone, doesn't alter behaviour: desire, action now has gone from bliss and joy to heaven . There is still the absolute distinction -heaven/hell - but whereas in sermons, Lust would deprive a man of heaven, here the experience of lust is heaven. The weakness of the argument is that it leads to...that is, the consequences only follow, are separate in time to the experience. The poem had sited its argument on the tactic of redefining the experience backwards in time - but that is always too late ( and who will shun heaven?), and experience (feeling) will overcome ethical knowledge. So you know it, but can never know it well enough for that knowledge to be stronger than the immediate feeling (knowledge is weakened by its temporality - it always comes, as a feeling, after the event. | |
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