Sonnet 152: In Loving Thee Thou Knowst I Am Forsworn
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In loving thee thou knowst I am forsworn,
But thou art twice forsworn to me love swearing, In act thy bed-vow broke and new faith torn, In vowing new hate after new love bearing. But why of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee, When I break twenty: I am perjured most, For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee, And all my honest faith in thee is lost. For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness, Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy, And to enlighten thee gave eyes to blindness, Or made them swear against the thing they see, For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye, To swear against the truth so foul a lie. |
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In loving thee thou knowst I am forsworn,
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You know that by simply loving you I am breaking a vow, or, rather more accurately, vows in general.
Which vow or vows William Shakespeare is here referring to is not yet further specified, but then it doesn't really need to be because, as the sonnet itself is about to admit, there are many, and several of them will shortly be named. Until then though, the first and most obvious ones that spring to mind are his marriage vows to his wife Anne, and any vow, implicit or explicit, he has made to his young lover. Of these latter ones we cannot be certain, but Shakespeare does directly accuse his young lover of being false and indeed forsworn when he has affairs with other people, including Shakespeare's own mistress, most likely this particular woman here being addressed, and so we can fairly safely assume that some sort of promise of commitment has been made between the two men as well. Sonnet 93 with its opening line, "So shall I live, supposing thou art true, | Like a deceived husband" indirectly but strongly alludes to this. Sonnet 42 speaking of a "twofold truth" that the young man is breaking in his "having her," Shakespeare's mistress, comes even closer, while Sonnet 88 directly employs the same word as this one: When thou shalt be disposed to set me light, And place my merit in the eye of scorn, Upon thy side against myself I'll fight And prove thee virtuous though thou art forsworn: There are, of course, any number of other ways in which Shakespeare might think of himself as being 'forsworn' for loving his mistress, but apart from the ones he is about to cite, these would all be purely speculative, and we may therefore allow ourselves not to dwell on them. |
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But thou art twice forsworn to me love swearing,
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But you are in fact doubly forsworn – and thus by implication at this stage in the poem twice as much forsworn as I am – if or as or when you swear love to me.
We already know or think we know why: previous sonnets have made it abundantly clear that the mistress has and actively pursues other lovers, but an interesting additional factor is now being brought into play: |
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In act thy bed-vow broke and new faith torn,
In vowing new hate after new love bearing. |
There are several possible readings of this line. The core most likely means:
In the act of having sex with somebody else you have broken the bed-vow, which is generally and reasonably understood to be the marriage vow to your husband; and you also then break a vow in tearing apart a new or different lover's faith in you by now vowing that you hate them and love yet someone else; whereby the 'new or different' love, as well as the 'someone else' in this constellation could be Shakespeare, or his young lover, or someone else entirely. It has been suggested that the line may imply that the mistress is newly wed and is now newly hating her own husband after a relatively short time; the only problem we have then is that this is actually only one vow she is breaking, and we really need two in order for her to be "twice forsworn." And while logic is, as we have noted on one or two occasions, not necessarily our Will's strongest suit, here it really would make sense for him to be thinking of two separate instances of vow-breaking. The specifics may be imprecise, even confusing, and maybe purposely so, the overall gist though is fairly clear: I may be breaking a vow in loving you but you are breaking twice as many, namely two. And this is as strong an indication as we will get that the mistress is indeed also married. All of which though is now relativised to striking effect: |
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But why of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty: I am perjured most, |
But why do I even accuse you of breaking two oaths when I in fact break ten times as many: twenty! Among the two of us I am certainly the most perjured by far.
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For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,
And all my honest faith in thee is lost. |
This now offers at least three possible meanings: either,
a) because all the vows that I ever make to anyone end up serving only to do you an injustice or to treat you badly or to misrepresent or indirectly mistreat, or to effectively betray you, and all the sincere trust I have in you ends up thus being lost; or b) because all the vows that I make to you end up being false and all the faith I have in you is lost; or c) because all the vows that I make to anyone or to you or to anyone including you end up being false and/or serve to do you an injustice and/or to betray you, and all my honest trust in anything or anyone is lost by or through you and your own fundamental unfaithfulness. Which of these applies is not immediately obvious, but our understanding of Will's predicament now receives at least some further elucidation, if not exactly clarification: |
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For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy, |
Because I have sworn deep, as in apparently or supposedly heartfelt, profound oaths, affirming your supposedly deep, as in endless or inexhaustible kindness, your love, your truth, as in your fidelity or trustworthiness, your faithfulness, all of which, so the implication, are in fact perjuries because you are none of these things...
"Deep kindness" as an expression is unusual and – especially in light of the sexually overcharged sonnet that precedes this one – quite possibly a pun. 'Kind' and 'kindness', as we noted when discussing Sonnet 143, is used by Shakespeare and others at the time, to mean 'sexual favours', and so there may well be some innuendo intended here. |
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And to enlighten thee gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see, |
And to make you seem 'lighter' as in 'brighter' or 'fairer' and therefore – as has been much discussed by now – in the traditional sense more beautiful, I have surrendered my eyes to a blindness that made them not see properly, or else forced my eyes to swear that they are looking at something they cannot see, which is that you are 'fair' as is 'beautiful' and also as in pale-skinned, bright-eyed, and fair-haired.
And here comes the confirmation and in a sense killer line: |
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For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie. |
Because I have sworn that you are 'fair' – again, of course, in both those senses but here with a clearly deliberate emphasis on 'beautiful' – and therefore my eye, as well as I, the poet, whose eye so sees, am all the more perjured for swearing such an ugly, despicable lie as this against all evident truth.
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The last poem in the collection to address William Shakespeare's mistress directly, Sonnet 152 conclusively answers some questions, while leaving many old and several new ones open for us to ponder into posterity. It asserts again that his Dark Lady is indeed 'dark', both in appearance and in character, and here makes a stronger than ever point of how he as the poet is perjuring himself by repeatedly, even continuously, saying things about her that are simply not true; these things, notably, not being slanderous lies but favourable compliments. The sonnet thus epitomises the form that Shakespeare with his highly unusual series either deliberately or accidentally creates: that of the anti-love poem to someone he just can't resist, even though he knows that in this he presents as deep a character flaw in himself as the ones he perceives in the person or people he professes to love or desire.
When discussing The Sonnet as a Poetic Form with Professor Stephen Regan on this podcast, we learnt how unorthodox William Shakespeare's sonnet series really is, compared to other poets' sonnet cycles at the time. Not only, Professor Regan pointed out, does he give us two lovers rather than just the standard one, and not only is one of these – and by far the more prominent of the two at that – a man, but both these objects of his love and desire are deeply flawed. Other poets may admire their ladies' dark eyes, in contrast to the more conventional bright ones, but nobody goes as far as Shakespeare in almost literally denigrating their sonnets' addressee or recipient or subject, and quite so consistently.
The young man, as we noted with Sonnets 93 and 95 in particular, for example, but also with Sonnets 57 & 58, does not escape censure or at least sarcasm, but the relationship with him then appears to find a new, even, and much more steady keel, culminating in a "marriage of true minds" with Sonnet 116 and "mutual render, only me for thee" with the last 'proper' or regular sonnet in the Fair Youth sequence, Sonnet 125.
Before then we get the intermediate stops of Sonnet 120, "But that your trespass now becomes a fee, | Mine ransoms yours and yours must ransom me," and the emphatic closing couplet of Sonnet 123, addressed to time about his commitment to his young man, "This I do vow, and this shall ever be, | I will be true despite thy scythe and thee."
The overall effect is a denouement, if we want to call it that, from Sonnet 116 onwards, of William Shakespeare declaring his philandering with other people over and – despite all the ups and downs and the mutual betrayals – vowing, or at least promising, or at the very least seeking a settled and continued close friendship, of whatever kind precisely this by now may be, with his young man.
We have established, pretty much beyond reasonable doubt – throughout these reflections, but, if you want to pinpoint the occasions, particularly with Sonnets 33-35 and 40-42, mirrored in the Dark Lady sequence in Sonnets 133, 134, and 144 – that the poems about the Dark Lady overlap with the poems about the Fair Youth, and so we may wonder of course: who or what now wins and who loses out?
Is Shakespeare indeed, as we considered possible a moment ago, referring to these particular vows or promises to his young man when here he says he is forsworn, and does he lament, in his by now familiar way, the fact that because he can't resist his mistress he simply has to betray him? Or is this not it, but is he reminded of his wife Anne back in Stratford whom he has been unfaithful to with both his mistress and his young man and, by the sounds of some of these sonnets, quite possibly several other people?
And what of this bed-vow he is referring to? And why is he referring to it now? Does it make any difference to him if his mistress is married and betrays her husband with him, rather than 'merely' her myriad implied other lovers? Implied, it should be noted, less by this particular sonnet than by previous ones, especially the salacious pun fest stretching over Sonnets 135 and 136.
One way or another: is this how you treat a lady? Or anyone whom you are close to? By telling her, in what turns out to be your last poem to her in the published series, that saying she is beautiful, or faithful, or kind is all just ugly lies? Once again, we are left to wonder: what brings this on? Why is Shakespeare so 'down' on his mistress? Is he down on his mistress or is he turning a man who is, as Samuel Johnson 150 years later so famously put it, "tired of London" and therefore, by necessity, and rather more generally, "tired of life?"
If Sonnet 152, now concluding the Dark Lady segment of the collection, tells us anything, it is that our Will is not best gruntled. These are not the words of a happy poet. An argument could be made that no true poet can ever be a truly happy one: whence, if they were, should stem their poetry? But this unease, this discrepancy between the truth I wish to speak and what I actually find myself saying, it discomfits me, the poet. And so by necessity it puts us too on edge.
And there is no doubt that I wish to speak true. My plays may all be make-believe, but these are my sonnets. Sonnet 21, about the young man:
O let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then, believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother's child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air.
Sonnet 82, to the young man:
Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathised
In true plain words by thy true-telling friend,
Sonnet 95 takes true-telling about as far as a poet in those circumstances may:
O what a mansion have those vices got
Which for their habitation chose out thee,
Where beauty's veil doth cover every blot
And all things turns to fair that eyes can see!
Take heed, dear heart, of this large privilege:
The hardest knife ill used doth lose his edge.
So Shakespeare practises what he preaches, if preach is what he does. He certainly doesn't hold back, and interestingly he doesn't of course in his poetry, belie his mistress either, he does the opposite, most famously in Sonnet 130:
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
And still, he finds himself forsworn, which suggests he does so in person when speaking to her, or when speaking to other people about her, or, perhaps most devastating of all, when convincing himself that she is all these things he knows her not to be.
Even so, this relationship does not come down to earth with a bump. There is no 'closure'. There is no conclusion. There is no resolution. There is the continuous present of "In loving thee..." with all its attendant discomfiture. It is limbo. The border territory of semi-requited, semi-fulfilled; semi-wanted, semi-despised; semi-desired, semi-dejected 'love', if it merits the term. It does not properly seem to merit the term 'affection'. It does probably merit the term 'lust'. It is neither tragic nor comic: this relationship features no Romeo and no Juliet, no Benedick and no Beatrice. Nor is it historic, no Antony, no Cleopatra. It tastes, no matter our favourite flavours, neither savoury, nor sour, nor sweet: it just sits there, somewhat unsatisfactory.
How odd. And how appropriate, in a way, that here in the sonnets William Shakespeare, who knows how to round things off, who understands a dramatic arc, who can conceive a conclusion when and wherever he wants or feels that he needs one should leave it there. Where we don't know where we are.
We don't have the answers to any of the questions this sonnet poses, any more than we have most of the concrete answers to most of the questions most of the other sonnets pose. We have mostly a sense. And that sense seems to support, once again, rather than disperse, the notion of a genuinely perturbed poet in a genuinely lived and felt connection with a genuinely real woman. Because: why on earth would you make this up? If your project were to sell poems? If your practice was to hone your craft? If your endeavour was to impress anyone at all, including yourself?
Why would you write such awkwardness, if you didn't have to, because it were true? When truth is what you strive for, what you want from yourself, what you declare to your lovers and the world around you repeatedly you stand for?
Or is it all make-believe? A game played out for our poet's amusement? Is he laughing his head off beyond his grave that we should take him so seriously, should even wonder?
Who knows.
Some would say: who cares?
I of course do care. If I didn't I would hardly have delved so much, so deep, so long into these sonnets and invited you to come with me and do so too.
But no further answers are now forthcoming. What remains is not yet silence, but two poems that puzzle in their own right and that have scholars speculate in all manner of ways about when and how and why and wherefore precisely they were composed. They are in a different category altogether, one jointly of their own, and they both speak of the figure, the character, the myth that makes us all fall in love and that therefore stands at the source of all this: the "little love-god" Cupid...
When discussing The Sonnet as a Poetic Form with Professor Stephen Regan on this podcast, we learnt how unorthodox William Shakespeare's sonnet series really is, compared to other poets' sonnet cycles at the time. Not only, Professor Regan pointed out, does he give us two lovers rather than just the standard one, and not only is one of these – and by far the more prominent of the two at that – a man, but both these objects of his love and desire are deeply flawed. Other poets may admire their ladies' dark eyes, in contrast to the more conventional bright ones, but nobody goes as far as Shakespeare in almost literally denigrating their sonnets' addressee or recipient or subject, and quite so consistently.
The young man, as we noted with Sonnets 93 and 95 in particular, for example, but also with Sonnets 57 & 58, does not escape censure or at least sarcasm, but the relationship with him then appears to find a new, even, and much more steady keel, culminating in a "marriage of true minds" with Sonnet 116 and "mutual render, only me for thee" with the last 'proper' or regular sonnet in the Fair Youth sequence, Sonnet 125.
Before then we get the intermediate stops of Sonnet 120, "But that your trespass now becomes a fee, | Mine ransoms yours and yours must ransom me," and the emphatic closing couplet of Sonnet 123, addressed to time about his commitment to his young man, "This I do vow, and this shall ever be, | I will be true despite thy scythe and thee."
The overall effect is a denouement, if we want to call it that, from Sonnet 116 onwards, of William Shakespeare declaring his philandering with other people over and – despite all the ups and downs and the mutual betrayals – vowing, or at least promising, or at the very least seeking a settled and continued close friendship, of whatever kind precisely this by now may be, with his young man.
We have established, pretty much beyond reasonable doubt – throughout these reflections, but, if you want to pinpoint the occasions, particularly with Sonnets 33-35 and 40-42, mirrored in the Dark Lady sequence in Sonnets 133, 134, and 144 – that the poems about the Dark Lady overlap with the poems about the Fair Youth, and so we may wonder of course: who or what now wins and who loses out?
Is Shakespeare indeed, as we considered possible a moment ago, referring to these particular vows or promises to his young man when here he says he is forsworn, and does he lament, in his by now familiar way, the fact that because he can't resist his mistress he simply has to betray him? Or is this not it, but is he reminded of his wife Anne back in Stratford whom he has been unfaithful to with both his mistress and his young man and, by the sounds of some of these sonnets, quite possibly several other people?
And what of this bed-vow he is referring to? And why is he referring to it now? Does it make any difference to him if his mistress is married and betrays her husband with him, rather than 'merely' her myriad implied other lovers? Implied, it should be noted, less by this particular sonnet than by previous ones, especially the salacious pun fest stretching over Sonnets 135 and 136.
One way or another: is this how you treat a lady? Or anyone whom you are close to? By telling her, in what turns out to be your last poem to her in the published series, that saying she is beautiful, or faithful, or kind is all just ugly lies? Once again, we are left to wonder: what brings this on? Why is Shakespeare so 'down' on his mistress? Is he down on his mistress or is he turning a man who is, as Samuel Johnson 150 years later so famously put it, "tired of London" and therefore, by necessity, and rather more generally, "tired of life?"
If Sonnet 152, now concluding the Dark Lady segment of the collection, tells us anything, it is that our Will is not best gruntled. These are not the words of a happy poet. An argument could be made that no true poet can ever be a truly happy one: whence, if they were, should stem their poetry? But this unease, this discrepancy between the truth I wish to speak and what I actually find myself saying, it discomfits me, the poet. And so by necessity it puts us too on edge.
And there is no doubt that I wish to speak true. My plays may all be make-believe, but these are my sonnets. Sonnet 21, about the young man:
O let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then, believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother's child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air.
Sonnet 82, to the young man:
Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathised
In true plain words by thy true-telling friend,
Sonnet 95 takes true-telling about as far as a poet in those circumstances may:
O what a mansion have those vices got
Which for their habitation chose out thee,
Where beauty's veil doth cover every blot
And all things turns to fair that eyes can see!
Take heed, dear heart, of this large privilege:
The hardest knife ill used doth lose his edge.
So Shakespeare practises what he preaches, if preach is what he does. He certainly doesn't hold back, and interestingly he doesn't of course in his poetry, belie his mistress either, he does the opposite, most famously in Sonnet 130:
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
And still, he finds himself forsworn, which suggests he does so in person when speaking to her, or when speaking to other people about her, or, perhaps most devastating of all, when convincing himself that she is all these things he knows her not to be.
Even so, this relationship does not come down to earth with a bump. There is no 'closure'. There is no conclusion. There is no resolution. There is the continuous present of "In loving thee..." with all its attendant discomfiture. It is limbo. The border territory of semi-requited, semi-fulfilled; semi-wanted, semi-despised; semi-desired, semi-dejected 'love', if it merits the term. It does not properly seem to merit the term 'affection'. It does probably merit the term 'lust'. It is neither tragic nor comic: this relationship features no Romeo and no Juliet, no Benedick and no Beatrice. Nor is it historic, no Antony, no Cleopatra. It tastes, no matter our favourite flavours, neither savoury, nor sour, nor sweet: it just sits there, somewhat unsatisfactory.
How odd. And how appropriate, in a way, that here in the sonnets William Shakespeare, who knows how to round things off, who understands a dramatic arc, who can conceive a conclusion when and wherever he wants or feels that he needs one should leave it there. Where we don't know where we are.
We don't have the answers to any of the questions this sonnet poses, any more than we have most of the concrete answers to most of the questions most of the other sonnets pose. We have mostly a sense. And that sense seems to support, once again, rather than disperse, the notion of a genuinely perturbed poet in a genuinely lived and felt connection with a genuinely real woman. Because: why on earth would you make this up? If your project were to sell poems? If your practice was to hone your craft? If your endeavour was to impress anyone at all, including yourself?
Why would you write such awkwardness, if you didn't have to, because it were true? When truth is what you strive for, what you want from yourself, what you declare to your lovers and the world around you repeatedly you stand for?
Or is it all make-believe? A game played out for our poet's amusement? Is he laughing his head off beyond his grave that we should take him so seriously, should even wonder?
Who knows.
Some would say: who cares?
I of course do care. If I didn't I would hardly have delved so much, so deep, so long into these sonnets and invited you to come with me and do so too.
But no further answers are now forthcoming. What remains is not yet silence, but two poems that puzzle in their own right and that have scholars speculate in all manner of ways about when and how and why and wherefore precisely they were composed. They are in a different category altogether, one jointly of their own, and they both speak of the figure, the character, the myth that makes us all fall in love and that therefore stands at the source of all this: the "little love-god" Cupid...
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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!