Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. Post by John Meyer
I found this sonnet to be insightful and creative in its exploration of sexual desire, fulfillment, and memories. It is clear that the speaker has experience in these matters, but he takes an impersonal approach and doesn’t directly refer to his own experiences. The poem can be a little confusing because it jumps around in time, so I think that it helps to break this poem down into how Shakespeare portrays people as thinking about sex before, during, and after the act. The Shakespearean sonnet form lends itself well to this way of viewing the poem because the different quatrains, which all possess the standard rhyme scheme abab, each address some new aspect of the lusting/shame process involved with people’s sexual desires.
The poem opens with an almost violent image of lust’s consummation. Sexual fulfillment is described as, “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action.” This image serves to grab the reader’s attention. Shakespeare then retreats in time to a description of lust before this consummation. Nine negative descriptions or adjectives of lust are given, demonstrating how so many people view their sexual desires as a despicable aspect of themselves. In the next quatrain, Shakespeare demonstrates how quickly people go from lust before the act to shame immediately following. Shakespeare employs a number of methods to demonstrate how quickly one’s feelings change. As soon as the physical enjoyment is finished, it is “despiséd straight.” When people lust, the verb “hunted” is used to describe the search for the object of lust, but as soon as the act is consummated the hunter becomes the prey as if they had “swallowed bait.” The idea of sex being a sort of trap for people is continued with the fourth line of the quatrain: “On purpose laid to make the taker mad.” There seems to be no way that a person can resist this “bait” because their lust leads them to hunt for it in a way that is “savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.”
The final quatrain examines how sexual desire, fulfillment, and memories are all felt in unreasonable ways. Everything about sex is irrational and out of the range of our normal emotional scale because it is “mad in pursuit and in possession so, had having, and in quest to have, extreme.” Quickly sex goes from a “joy” to a “woe.” Shakespeare uses the word “dream” to say how it will be remembered, but his earlier descriptions would make it seem it would have to be a dream of madness. The final couplet wraps things up by taking a step back and saying that everybody is familiar with these sorts of irrational feelings, yet nobody seems to be able to deny their sexual desires. The poem makes me wonder whose understanding of sex Shakespeare is trying to portray. Is this his take on the matter, societies, or how people view sex due to the Church of England’s influence?