Sonnet 129: Th'Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame
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Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action and, till action, lust, Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad. Mad in pursuit and in possession so, Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme, A bliss in proof, and proved a very woe: Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows, yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. |
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Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
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The expenditure of your 'spirit' in a wasteful act of shame...
'Spirit' here has two distinct, contrasting meanings, both clearly intended. On the one hand it is your spiritual energy, the essence of your soul, and therefore the higher, elevated part of your being, but it is on the other hand also the 'vital spirit', which is a man's semen. The 'waste of shame' thus is both a wasteful act that entails shame, which suggests sexual intercourse that does not lead or aim to lead to procreation and is for this reason shameful, because it is, certainly in the Catholic Christian tradition, sinful; and it is also a shameful act of waste, because in this same tradition, a man is not supposed to 'waste' his semen, but to use it for one purpose and one purpose only, which is to father children with his wife. A further pun that is at the very least likely to be intended is on 'waist'. The pronunciation of both 'waste' and 'waist' then as now is virtually the same, and so expending your 'spirit' into a 'waist of shame' would suggest – somewhat crudely, one might add – ejaculating into the waist of someone who is, for various possible reasons, shameful. The opening line of this sonnet in this way strongly suggests that the sexual encounter that Shakespeare talks about here is not with his wife, but with an illicit sexual partner: most obviously the mistress introduced in Sonnet 127. And if, at this early stage in the sonnet, we were to entertain any doubt whether our reading of this line as a sexual reference may not be wrong, it is blown out of the water with the next line: |
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Is lust in action and, till action, lust,
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This 'expense of spirit' is lust in action – the act of sex – and until it is 'activated' or the actual expense happens – until the point of ejaculation – it is lust.
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Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
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It is, furthermore, perjured, because it breaks any marriage or lover's vows one may have made – this strongly underlines the notion of an illicit sexual act with a person other than your wife, or your committed lover – it is 'murderous', for which here read dangerous, potentially lethal, and borderline violent; 'bloody', here meaning 'brutal' or 'rude' or possibly 'messy' and also 'damnable', and 'full of blame', because it is both sinful in a religious sense, but also ethically dubious as it entails a betrayal, in Shakespeare's particular case certainly of his wife Anne, but also by this time quite likely of his younger male lover.
PRONUNCIATION: Note that murderous here has two syllables: [murd-rous]. |
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Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
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This line hardly needs translating: Shakespeare piles on the adjectives of what appears to be an intense sexual experience that is, however, not ever to be trusted.
PRONUNCIATION: Note that cruel here has two syllables: [cru-el]. |
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Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
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And no sooner has this act been enjoyed – the implication here absolutely being the moment climax has been reached – than it is now despised.
PRONUNCIATION: Note that despised here has three syllables: [des-pi-sed]. |
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Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, |
It is, this kind of sexual act, hunted or chased beyond all reason, and no sooner has it been had than it is hated to an equal degree, beyond anything that reason can comprehend...
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as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad. |
...much in the way one would hate a bait that one has swallowed that has been laid on purpose to make one, its taker, mad: in other words, much as one would hate being tricked or seduced into a trap which turns out to be deeply harmful because it makes you mad:
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Mad in pursuit,
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It makes you mad in your pursuit of that which you desire...
The principal object that is being pursued is still the 'expense of spirit', the act of sex, but increasingly also alluded to and included in this, quite naturally one might suggest, is the person so desired, as becomes clear now: |
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and in possession so,
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It also makes you mad in the 'possession' of this act, meaning in being able to carry it out, but also of course in the 'possession', sexually speaking, of the person you are thus having sex with:
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Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme,
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All of which, 1) the 'had', meaning the having had the person and completed the act, but possibly also to some extent the 'having been had' by that person, 2) the 'having', meaning the actual sex act, and 3) the 'quest to have', meaning the pursuit or chase or desire or lust: all of this is extreme, meaning that it is intense, excessive, beyond reason, and thus in that sense 'mad'.
The dense wordplay on 'having' and 'had' here very strongly supports the notion that Sonnet 52 similarly refers to that relationship with the young man having by then been sexually consummated: Blessed are you, whose worthiness gives scope, Being had, to triumph, being lacked, to hope. As we suggested at the time. |
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A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe:
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It is, in fact, blissfully, intensely enjoyable while being experienced and in the process of being made real or being proved, as in tried out and tested or carried out; but once 'proved', as in done and completed, it is a very woe: it is dejected sadness and misery.
Just exactly why it effectively ends in tears is here not spelt out again, the suggestion certainly is for the shame and guilt it brings, but two further associations are possible, possibly likely, to be intended. One being the commonplace notion post coitum omne animal triste, which translates as 'after coitus, every creature is sad', and the other a popular pun at the time on 'woman' being 'woe to man'. |
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Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
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Before it is experienced – the emphasis now again is on the act, more than on the person the act is carried out with – it is a joy that is proposed, meaning something that you look forward to and want and desire; after it has been experienced it is at best an insubstantial memory, at worst a nightmare.
Editors here generally refer to Shakespeare's second long narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece in which Tarquin, a prince and officer in the Roman army, contemplates the consequences of giving in to his lust and raping the wife of his friend and comrade in arms, Collatine. before he actually carries out the crime: "What win I if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy." From this, they mostly deduce 'dream' here to mean something similar to 'a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.' But Tarquin, when he starts his deliberation, is described as seriously torn: Here pale with fear he doth premeditate The dangers of his loathsome enterprise, And in his inward mind he doth debate What following sorrow may on this arise. And by this time now he has already spent three stanzas at seven lines each debating with himself the shame he will invite upon himself for doing what he intends to do. He continues: "Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week, Or sells eternity to get a toy? For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy? Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown, Would with the sceptre straight be strucken down? “If Collatinus dream of my intent, Will he not wake, and in a desperate rage Post hither, this vile purpose to prevent?-- This siege that hath engirt his marriage, This blur to youth, this sorrow to the sage, This dying virtue, this surviving shame, Whose crime will bear an ever-during blame?" And so 'dream' here very clearly is not a pleasant, beautiful, even wishful state, but a troubled, disturbed, even ominous one, just as the one that would wake up Collatinus; or as in Sonnet 107: Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come, where the 'wide world' is not dreaming on things to come as it wishes or hopes them to be, but dreads them to come to pass. And so while theoretically, 'dream' might be being deployed here in a positive sense, as often it is too, both in the sonnets and in the plays, this entire poem draws its strength from its juxtaposed contrasts – enjoyed/despised, hunted/hated, bliss/woe – and so we can be quite certain here that 'dream' is meant to be understood as the opposite of the joy proposed. |
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All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. |
And all of this, everything I have just said, the world well knows: everybody knows this to be so, but nobody knows how to shun, for which read avoid or escape or steer clear from the heaven – the bliss, the joy, the pleasure of sex – that leads men to this hell: the shame, the pain, the guilt, and, as is also possibly implied, the very real prospect and dire consequences of contracting a venereal disease.
Editors also point out that 'hell' at the time is a common 'euphemism' if one may call it that, for 'vagina'. In fact, Sonnet 144 strongly plays on precisely this meaning, as we shall see very soon when we come to it, and King Lear, by Act IV, Scene 6, somewhat off his mind, one might say, speaks of women, veering now from poetry to prose: Behold yond simpering dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow; That minces virtue, and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name. The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t with a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend’s; there’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption. All of which, incidentally, makes any suggestion you may come across that Shakespeare could here be talking about sex with anyone, male or female, positively ludicrous. PRONUNCIATION: Note that heaven here has one syllable: [hean]. |
Sonnet 129 is the most explicitly sexual, and therefore sexually explicit, poem in the collection so far; and it is the first to betray a deep unease on William Shakespeare's part with his own desire for his mistress. The language he employs to characterise the sexual act with her oscillates from ecstasy of expectation to post-coital depression, even disgust, with a vocabulary in-between that is reminiscent more of a war zone than of a romantic roll in the hay.
We concluded our discussion of Sonnet 128 with saying that it sounded like the kind of poem a man might write to his mistress before he had experienced the physical proximity to her that in the poem he professed to crave. And we foreshadowed that with this sonnet here, Sonnet 129, that is categorically not the case.
Of course we don't know whether these two sonnets were written in direct sequence, but we do know for absolutely certain that whoever put together the collection of 1609 placed them directly next to each other, and so we can certainly be forgiven for thinking that there is a degree of conscious purpose at work here in introducing 'my mistress' as a woman who defies the traditional ideal of beauty in Sonnet 127, then, in Sonnet 128, relating a desire to be intimate with her, and now describing in the starkest terms available the rollercoaster ride of feelings and sensations that come with the lust, the lust in action, and the satisfaction of that lust through action: a fulfilment that reeks mostly of dejection, bordering on despair.
The psychology in play here runs obviously deep: Shakespeare taps into centuries old vaults of fear, shame, self-disgust, and sorrow over being the kind of creature who falls prey, not just to his seductress, if that is what she is, but to his own irrational, uncontrollable, messy desire, and it could probably be argued that his moral dilemma that appears to stem from the cultural framework of his Christian, possibly Catholic, upbringing, here meets with an even more profoundly rooted male wariness as well as wonder at what 'woman' as a physical, sexual, organic entity is and does to 'man'.
This is surely noteworthy and significant. The poem clearly talks about sex with a woman. But it does not characterise her. It doesn't even mention her. It makes a general point – though detailed and forceful in its elaboration – about the experience of being horny, wanting sex, getting sex, and then feeling empty the moment the 'spirit' has been expended and the sex is over.
It is, at the same time, genuinely profound and disconcertingly banal. Anyone who's ever had sex with someone they didn't particularly care about but fancied, or didn't particularly fancy but who was available for the encounter will know the feeling. And it is telling that nothing resembling this sentiment appears in the Fair Youth section of the sonnets: there we get jealousy, rage, disappointment, dejection, criticism of character, all of that, yes, next to adoration, wonder, tenderness, affection, and praise. But not disgust or self-disgust. Not even shame or regret. And yet we do have good reason, as we saw then, when examining those sonnets, and as we were reminded just a moment ago, that Shakespeare's relationship with his young man does become sexual too.
Should we conclude then from this that Shakespeare cares about his young man but not about this woman who is almost certainly older than the young man and possibly older than he? Clearly not: other sonnets in this Dark Lady section tell us not just that he cares about her, but that he loves her, even if he does so, as he will also tell us, against his better judgment and against his own interest. The relationship, the dynamic is layered, complex.
What we can conclude from this sonnet – or infer is perhaps the more appropriate term, since nothing quite justifies anything as final as a conclusion just yet – is that our Will is torn here. He is obviously torn between his lust and his loyalties, he is torn between his physical need to act on his desire and his emotional response to actually fulfilling this desire, and he is torn between how he sees his ideal of man – "noble in reason" and "infinite in faculties" as Hamlet puts it in Act II, Scene 2, and, as Sonnet 94 has it, "to temptation slow" – and how he experiences being a man: slave to his animal instincts and unable "To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."
And if Sonnet 129 thus reflects man's dilemma in relation to woman in a general, so as not to say generic, way that is perhaps rather more universal than we would wish to readily admit today, the next sonnet will express a dilemma our Will has very specifically in relation to his Dark Lady. Because Sonnet 130 – with its opening line, My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun, among the most famous in the entire canon – characterises her in astonishingly unflattering terms, yet still concludes that to him she is as special as any woman who by her poet lover is eulogised in flowery language that compares her to all things wondrous and rare: clearly there is quite a bit more to this and has hitherto met the eye...
We concluded our discussion of Sonnet 128 with saying that it sounded like the kind of poem a man might write to his mistress before he had experienced the physical proximity to her that in the poem he professed to crave. And we foreshadowed that with this sonnet here, Sonnet 129, that is categorically not the case.
Of course we don't know whether these two sonnets were written in direct sequence, but we do know for absolutely certain that whoever put together the collection of 1609 placed them directly next to each other, and so we can certainly be forgiven for thinking that there is a degree of conscious purpose at work here in introducing 'my mistress' as a woman who defies the traditional ideal of beauty in Sonnet 127, then, in Sonnet 128, relating a desire to be intimate with her, and now describing in the starkest terms available the rollercoaster ride of feelings and sensations that come with the lust, the lust in action, and the satisfaction of that lust through action: a fulfilment that reeks mostly of dejection, bordering on despair.
The psychology in play here runs obviously deep: Shakespeare taps into centuries old vaults of fear, shame, self-disgust, and sorrow over being the kind of creature who falls prey, not just to his seductress, if that is what she is, but to his own irrational, uncontrollable, messy desire, and it could probably be argued that his moral dilemma that appears to stem from the cultural framework of his Christian, possibly Catholic, upbringing, here meets with an even more profoundly rooted male wariness as well as wonder at what 'woman' as a physical, sexual, organic entity is and does to 'man'.
This is surely noteworthy and significant. The poem clearly talks about sex with a woman. But it does not characterise her. It doesn't even mention her. It makes a general point – though detailed and forceful in its elaboration – about the experience of being horny, wanting sex, getting sex, and then feeling empty the moment the 'spirit' has been expended and the sex is over.
It is, at the same time, genuinely profound and disconcertingly banal. Anyone who's ever had sex with someone they didn't particularly care about but fancied, or didn't particularly fancy but who was available for the encounter will know the feeling. And it is telling that nothing resembling this sentiment appears in the Fair Youth section of the sonnets: there we get jealousy, rage, disappointment, dejection, criticism of character, all of that, yes, next to adoration, wonder, tenderness, affection, and praise. But not disgust or self-disgust. Not even shame or regret. And yet we do have good reason, as we saw then, when examining those sonnets, and as we were reminded just a moment ago, that Shakespeare's relationship with his young man does become sexual too.
Should we conclude then from this that Shakespeare cares about his young man but not about this woman who is almost certainly older than the young man and possibly older than he? Clearly not: other sonnets in this Dark Lady section tell us not just that he cares about her, but that he loves her, even if he does so, as he will also tell us, against his better judgment and against his own interest. The relationship, the dynamic is layered, complex.
What we can conclude from this sonnet – or infer is perhaps the more appropriate term, since nothing quite justifies anything as final as a conclusion just yet – is that our Will is torn here. He is obviously torn between his lust and his loyalties, he is torn between his physical need to act on his desire and his emotional response to actually fulfilling this desire, and he is torn between how he sees his ideal of man – "noble in reason" and "infinite in faculties" as Hamlet puts it in Act II, Scene 2, and, as Sonnet 94 has it, "to temptation slow" – and how he experiences being a man: slave to his animal instincts and unable "To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."
And if Sonnet 129 thus reflects man's dilemma in relation to woman in a general, so as not to say generic, way that is perhaps rather more universal than we would wish to readily admit today, the next sonnet will express a dilemma our Will has very specifically in relation to his Dark Lady. Because Sonnet 130 – with its opening line, My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun, among the most famous in the entire canon – characterises her in astonishingly unflattering terms, yet still concludes that to him she is as special as any woman who by her poet lover is eulogised in flowery language that compares her to all things wondrous and rare: clearly there is quite a bit more to this and has hitherto met the eye...
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!