Sonnet 151: Love Is too Young to Know What Conscience Is
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Love is too young to know what conscience is,
Yet who knows not conscience is borne of love. Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss, Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove. For thou betraying me, I do betray My nobler part to my gross body's treason, My soul doth tell my body that he may Triumph in love, flesh stays no further reason, But rising at thy name doth point out thee As his triumphant prize; proud of his pride, He is contented thy poor drudge to be, To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side. No want of conscience hold it that I call Her 'love' for whose dear love I rise and fall. |
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Love is too young to know what conscience is,
Yet who knows not conscience is borne of love. |
Love – by which here is meant the personification of love in the god Cupid who is traditionally represented as a boy or a youth – is too young to have a conscience – here to mean an understanding of what is right or wrong – and yet, who doesn't know that such an understanding actually stems from the experience or emotion of love.
The innocent word play on 'love', with its to us perhaps puzzling assertion that a sense of a moral compass or an awareness of right or wrong be 'borne of love' takes on a whole different dimension when we bear in mind that it is mirrored by a far more suggestive word play on 'conscience'. Both Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition of the Sonnets and John Kerrigan in the Penguin edition readily name and spell out what Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden edition rather more coyly draws on Stephen Booth for, when she cites him to explain that here as well as when it reappears later in lines 11 and 13 "'con-' alludes to 'the commonest name for the female sex organ'." 'Con-science' thus becomes a knowledge of con which in turn is a French slang term for said organ, and, so John Kerrigan, it "was often used bawdily in Elizabethan and Jacobean English." (I refrain from pronouncing the word here on this podcast, not because I am prudish but because I am aware that we have listeners in well over 100 countries allover the world, and sensitivities towards this kind of language do vary a great deal.) Shakespeare thus sets the tone for a poem that is laced with strong sexual innuendo, and in view of what's to come, we have very good reason indeed to believe that he is doing so absolutely intentionally and deliberately and himself fully conscious in our sense of the word of what he is doing. The line then also means: the little love-god, as Shakespeare will call him in the last of the these sonnets soon, is too young to have carnal knowledge, so to speak, or more graphically, to be acquainted with a woman's vagina, but yet who doesn't know that that same knowledge or familiarity stems from people being in love. And suddenly all of this makes perfect sense. |
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Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove. |
And so this being the case, you who you are a cheater because, as has long been established in these sonnets, you are unfaithful to me and to others, do not level charges against me for my misdeeds, if you don't want to show yourself guilty of exactly the same faults as mine.
This does not strictly follow as a logical consequence, but implied seems to be that if you accuse me of being a philanderer, I will simply return the charge and be able to cite evidence of you being just as sexually liberal as I am. The tender language of a 'gentle' cheater and 'thy sweet self' stands in contrast – also surely deliberate – to the inherent admonition for being just as bad as I am; and this in turn reminds us of the closing couplet of the previous sonnet which suggested that I have lowered myself to loving someone as 'unworthy' as you. The line also though evokes the language of Sonnet 40: "I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief," which was addressed to the young man, his theft being none other, of course, than this mistress of Shakespeare's, and this once more points towards these two groups of sonnets referring to events that happen at the same time and therefore also referring to each other. ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION: Note that in OP prove rhymes with love above in a short 'o' sound similar to our 'dove'. |
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For thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body's treason, |
Because as and while you betray me with other men, so do I betray the nobler part of me, my soul, by giving in to the treason that my gross body commits with you when, as is implied, we have sex, or when I get aroused by you. The body is 'gross' because it is in this manner untamed and uncouth.
There may be a secondary meaning – as some editors suggest – of 'you betraying me to the world', as in you allowing the 'secret' of my love or lust for you to be known to others, but there is no direct strong indication in this group of sonnets to suggest that the mistress is indiscreet, except in the way she handles her own sexuality. That said, Sonnet 36 does speak of "those blots that do with me remain" as having to be "borne by me alone" and urges his young man not to associate with him any more so as not to tarnish his own reputation, and in the context of that sonnet we also mentioned the poem Willobie His Avisa, published in 1594, in which an author calling himself Henry Willobie rather intriguingly speaks of a W. S. and his 'familiar' friend H. W. who share "the curtesy" of a "like passion" for a lady, resulting in a "like infection." And so it is possible that these dots connect to a triangular relationship that becomes public knowledge, and that for this reason Shakespeare is here alluding also to an indiscretion on the part of his Dark Lady. |
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My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love, flesh stays no further reason, |
My soul – the nobler part of me – tells my body that he may go ahead and 'triumph' in love, meaning win that which he, the body, so desires; and my flesh, for which generally we might read my body but, as becomes clear in a moment, by which is meant specifically my own sexual organ, does not wait for any further reason or justification or encouragement to do just that.
'May' here can mean either 'he may go ahead', as in he has permission to do so, or 'he may be able to go ahead' as in he might be successful in his attempt to do so. Either way: the soul is granting the body licence to pursue sex. Here we find another case in point, incidentally, for arguing, as we did, that Sonnet 52 reveals a sexual relationship between William Shakespeare and his young man: Blessed are you, whose worthiness gives scope, Being had, to triumph, being lacked, to hope. To 'triumph' in love' clearly means to win someone sexually. |
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But rising at thy name doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize; |
My flesh, for which here now unmistakably read my penis, when it rises in response to hearing your name, as it were, points in your direction and identifies you as his triumphant prize,
The penis, going erect at the mere mention of the lady's name, is like a soldier standing to attention, and, somewhat mixing the metaphor, like the needle of a compass it points due north at the target he wishes to conquer. |
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proud of his pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be, To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side. |
Proud at being so erect – and with something of a boast quite possibly of his own size – he is happy to be your poor slave, someone who stands to attention when you command him to and who falls by your side.
The image of the brave soldier is further invoked: my erection is there to stand in your service and then when that service is done, it will gladly fall back to its detumescent state, lying by your side, having 'died' in you, absolutely in the sense that was common usage then, when 'to die' meant 'to orgasm'. |
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No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her 'love' for whose dear love I rise and fall. |
Don't hold it against me as a lack of any ability to know what's right or wrong, or, conversely, don't think of it as any lack of knowledge of the female anatomy on my part, when I call that woman – namely you – 'love', for whose dear love – here in this context really for whose sexual attention or favour – I regularly go hard and then, for good reason, as is implied, soft again...
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The heavily and obviously innuendo-laden Sonnet 151 returns to a struggle the poet purports to experience between what his soul – the 'nobler part' of his being – knows to be right and what his body wants and, with the by implication reluctant permission of the soul, then also gets: sex with his mistress. Although coached in euphemism and metaphor, it is in fact one of the most sexually explicit sonnets in the collection and succeeds in leaving remarkably little to the imagination, once unpacked.
With the penultimate sonnet in the series to address his mistress directly, William Shakespeare once more pulls the registers of suggestiveness, to the point where we may feel inclined to wonder, is this poetic or mostly puerile, or possibly both.
One of the recurring questions we have been asking ourselves when looking at and listening to these sonnets has been, what brings this on, why is Shakespeare at this point in whatever proceedings he is involved in putting pen to paper in this way? And for the most part we can but speculate, as is the case here too.
What distinguishes Sonnet 151 from some of the other sonnets in the Dark Lady segment of this collection is that unlike those that speak of a disdain the lady has for the poet, and of her apparent reluctance to have sex with him, this poem talks about sex with her as something that not only has happened but happens regularly, and, so we are led to understand, quite right too.
This may mean that a change in the lady's attitude to her poet has taken place and she now, unlike then, grants him the sex he desires; it may also be wishful thinking. It may even be neither of these, but simply a poet showing off how clever he can be with language.
The poem certainly does have more than a hint of both literal and metaphorical cockiness about it, a stance we also detected in the previous sonnet, and if – as we have mostly been doing with these sonnets – we continue to assume that they are not mere exercises in sonneteering but rooted in real life experiences with real life characters, then this change of tone and the sudden perkiness in Shakespeare's posture, so as not to say posturing, would hint at a change in Shakespeare's sexual fortunes with his mistress.
This could be the case for any reason at all, but in the constellational context of these sonnets as we have encountered them, a speculative and therefore it has to be said highly conjectural sequence of events that offers itself would permit for a scenario in which the poet desires his Dark Lady and introduces her to his young lover who – as Sonnet 134 implies – "came debtor for my sake," meaning that he was meant to charm her on Shakespeare's behalf, but ended up being her 'friend' in a decidedly non-platonic way, much as the crisis explored in Sonnets 33 through 42 and mirrored in Sonnets 133, 134, 144 suggests.
In such an imagined situation he might then persevere in spite of himself, as Sonnets 135, 136, and 137 imply, until he finally gets to "lie with her and she with me," both in the sense of having sex with each other and lying to each other about each other's respective fidelity to each other and other people.
Without wishing to impose a strict chronological order on the sonnets as they feature in the collection, what then follows appears to reflect the mistress's continued interest in, and eyes for, other men, culminating in Sonnet 144 with its Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair, although this also puts a bit of a spanner in the works in claiming, about whether or not the young man and the mistress are by this time having a sexual relationship too:
Yet this shall I never know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
The 'bad angel' in this constellation being the Dark Lady, the good one the young man who may or may not by now be finding himself in her 'hell'. her 'hell', as we noted whenever relevant being a none-too-subtle reference to her vagina.
All of this, of course, needs to be treated with the requisite and appropriate degree of caution. The Sonnets, as many a scholar will assure you, do not tell a coherent, linear story, whether they reflect the poet's experiences or not. The best they can do, or, the closest to a narrative they can get, is a series of episodes that in parts hang together, in parts overlap. In parts form a strong, compelling picture, in others a more diffuse, even confused and confusing one.
What we can say about Sonnet 151 – and really also about Sonnet 150 and the last of these Dark Lady poems, Sonnet 152 – is that it expresses a man's lust for a woman he knows to be as promiscuous as he is; that he wants the reader or listener of this sonnet, be that now the lady in question or an audience at the time, or over time us, to understand that he thinks of and refers to this woman as 'love' because she sexually arouses him and, so the poem suggests, has sex with him.
And this may well be the principal point of this sonnet, especially in the context of what the other sonnets in this part of the collection strongly suggest: this relationship with the Dark Lady is sexual. Not 'sexual too' but primarily, principally, it is about sex. Don't call it a moral flaw in me – and obviously don't put it down to any lack of knowledge of a woman's sexual organs you might suppose in me – that I think of her as my 'love', this woman whom I want to and do have sex with. That is enough to warrant my emotion. Of course, I cannot expect her to be faithful, I know she has other lovers; she appears, if the next sonnet is to be believed and as has been suggested before, to be married; her beauty is pretty much a matter of taste and many seem unable to see it, but we have good sex. Or even just: we have sex. Whether it is good or bad is neither here nor there, really. What more do I want?
And what more, in a way, do we want, from our poet?
We are here nearly at our journey's end. What comes next is one more sonnet that speaks directly to this woman, and it is a sonnet that, maybe appropriately, asks as many questions as it answers, leaves as many things as it ties up unresolved. And then two allegorical poems that do refer to 'my mistress' still and maybe are included for that reason, but that seem to serve the collection no longer directly as component parts, but, jointly, almost as a coda.
With the penultimate sonnet in the series to address his mistress directly, William Shakespeare once more pulls the registers of suggestiveness, to the point where we may feel inclined to wonder, is this poetic or mostly puerile, or possibly both.
One of the recurring questions we have been asking ourselves when looking at and listening to these sonnets has been, what brings this on, why is Shakespeare at this point in whatever proceedings he is involved in putting pen to paper in this way? And for the most part we can but speculate, as is the case here too.
What distinguishes Sonnet 151 from some of the other sonnets in the Dark Lady segment of this collection is that unlike those that speak of a disdain the lady has for the poet, and of her apparent reluctance to have sex with him, this poem talks about sex with her as something that not only has happened but happens regularly, and, so we are led to understand, quite right too.
This may mean that a change in the lady's attitude to her poet has taken place and she now, unlike then, grants him the sex he desires; it may also be wishful thinking. It may even be neither of these, but simply a poet showing off how clever he can be with language.
The poem certainly does have more than a hint of both literal and metaphorical cockiness about it, a stance we also detected in the previous sonnet, and if – as we have mostly been doing with these sonnets – we continue to assume that they are not mere exercises in sonneteering but rooted in real life experiences with real life characters, then this change of tone and the sudden perkiness in Shakespeare's posture, so as not to say posturing, would hint at a change in Shakespeare's sexual fortunes with his mistress.
This could be the case for any reason at all, but in the constellational context of these sonnets as we have encountered them, a speculative and therefore it has to be said highly conjectural sequence of events that offers itself would permit for a scenario in which the poet desires his Dark Lady and introduces her to his young lover who – as Sonnet 134 implies – "came debtor for my sake," meaning that he was meant to charm her on Shakespeare's behalf, but ended up being her 'friend' in a decidedly non-platonic way, much as the crisis explored in Sonnets 33 through 42 and mirrored in Sonnets 133, 134, 144 suggests.
In such an imagined situation he might then persevere in spite of himself, as Sonnets 135, 136, and 137 imply, until he finally gets to "lie with her and she with me," both in the sense of having sex with each other and lying to each other about each other's respective fidelity to each other and other people.
Without wishing to impose a strict chronological order on the sonnets as they feature in the collection, what then follows appears to reflect the mistress's continued interest in, and eyes for, other men, culminating in Sonnet 144 with its Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair, although this also puts a bit of a spanner in the works in claiming, about whether or not the young man and the mistress are by this time having a sexual relationship too:
Yet this shall I never know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
The 'bad angel' in this constellation being the Dark Lady, the good one the young man who may or may not by now be finding himself in her 'hell'. her 'hell', as we noted whenever relevant being a none-too-subtle reference to her vagina.
All of this, of course, needs to be treated with the requisite and appropriate degree of caution. The Sonnets, as many a scholar will assure you, do not tell a coherent, linear story, whether they reflect the poet's experiences or not. The best they can do, or, the closest to a narrative they can get, is a series of episodes that in parts hang together, in parts overlap. In parts form a strong, compelling picture, in others a more diffuse, even confused and confusing one.
What we can say about Sonnet 151 – and really also about Sonnet 150 and the last of these Dark Lady poems, Sonnet 152 – is that it expresses a man's lust for a woman he knows to be as promiscuous as he is; that he wants the reader or listener of this sonnet, be that now the lady in question or an audience at the time, or over time us, to understand that he thinks of and refers to this woman as 'love' because she sexually arouses him and, so the poem suggests, has sex with him.
And this may well be the principal point of this sonnet, especially in the context of what the other sonnets in this part of the collection strongly suggest: this relationship with the Dark Lady is sexual. Not 'sexual too' but primarily, principally, it is about sex. Don't call it a moral flaw in me – and obviously don't put it down to any lack of knowledge of a woman's sexual organs you might suppose in me – that I think of her as my 'love', this woman whom I want to and do have sex with. That is enough to warrant my emotion. Of course, I cannot expect her to be faithful, I know she has other lovers; she appears, if the next sonnet is to be believed and as has been suggested before, to be married; her beauty is pretty much a matter of taste and many seem unable to see it, but we have good sex. Or even just: we have sex. Whether it is good or bad is neither here nor there, really. What more do I want?
And what more, in a way, do we want, from our poet?
We are here nearly at our journey's end. What comes next is one more sonnet that speaks directly to this woman, and it is a sonnet that, maybe appropriately, asks as many questions as it answers, leaves as many things as it ties up unresolved. And then two allegorical poems that do refer to 'my mistress' still and maybe are included for that reason, but that seem to serve the collection no longer directly as component parts, but, jointly, almost as a coda.
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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!