Sonnet 129 by William Shakespeare

First published: 1609, in Sonnets

Type of poem: Sonnet

The Poem

Sonnet 129 is a typical Shakespearean sonnet in form, written in iambic pentameter with twelve lines rhymed abab, cdcd, efef, and a closing couplet rhymed gg. Unlike the majority of William Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, it is not addressed to a particular individual but is directed to an audience, as a sermon is.

The first line is the only one that presents any difficulty in interpretation. Shakespeare sometimes compressed a large meaning into few words, creating an impressionistic effect. Although this opening line appears a bit garbled, it is easy enough to understand and well suited to the mood of the poem. It creates the impression of a mind overwhelmed by a whirlwind of bitter reflections.

He is obviously talking about sexual lust. The first line states that lust is shameful and spiritually debilitating. The rest of the poem simply expands upon this idea. The torrent of adjectives and short descriptive phrases that follows suggests the different ways in which sexual lust can lead to tragic outcomes. The reader may evoke specific illustrations from personal experience or from the world’s literature which, from the Bible and Greek mythology to modern novels such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), is full of warnings against lust.

Each word or phrase in the opening lines suggests different scenarios. For example, the word “perjur’d” suggests the lies men tell women, the most common being “I love you” and “I want to marry you.” Lust drives people to say many things they do not mean. The word “perjur’d” also suggests the humiliating experience of having to lie to the fiancé or spouse of one’s lover, who might even be a personal friend.

The word “bloody” suggests even more serious outcomes of sexual lust. The outraged husband who discovers his wife in bed with another man may murder her, or him, or both. Lust also may lead to bloody abortions and suicides. “Full of blame” suggests the painful aftermath of many affairs based not on love but on lust. The woman blames the man for deceiving her; he blames her for leading him on, for allowing herself to become pregnant, or for confessing her adultery to her husband. “Full of blame” in Shakespeare’s time probably suggested the great danger of contracting syphilis or gonorrhea, and in recent times it suggests the modern plague of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).

The closing couplet of the sonnet alights gracefully, with the juxtaposition of “well knows” and “knows well.” The tone is like the calm after a storm. It is not a happy conclusion but a truthful one. Humanity repeats the same mistakes generation after generation. Sexual passion is hard to control and leads to much of the tragedy that human beings experience.

Forms and Devices

There are two important things to notice about the structure of this sonnet. One is that, except for the closing couplet, it consists of a single run-on sentence. The other is that it is built around a single simile, which takes up the seventh and eighth lines. The effect of crowding most of the poem into a single outburst is to leave the reader with a feeling of agitation mirroring the conflicting emotions that accompany sexual lust. Run-on sentences are often the targets of English teachers’ red pencils, but at times such sentences can be extremely effective.

Shakespeare often filled his sonnets with metaphors and similes, as he did in his famous Sonnet 73, in which he compares his time of life to winter, to sunset, and to a dying fire. In other sonnets, however, he deliberately avoids metaphors and similes in order to obtain the maximum effect from a single striking image. This is the case in another of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, Sonnet 29, which begins, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” After complaining at length about his miserable condition, the speaker changes his tone entirely and says that, should he happen to remember the friendship of the person he is addressing, his state, “Like to the lark at break of day arising/ From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.” These are two of the most beautiful lines in English poetry, and they are more effective because they are not competing with any other imagery in the sonnet.

In Sonnet 129, the dominant image is contained in the lines: “Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait/ On purpose laid to make the taker mad.” After this—but without starting a new sentence—the poet launches into another tirade, echoing the word “Mad” at the beginning of the next line and rhyming it with “Had” at the beginning of the line after that. These devices arouse apprehension because it seems as if the speaker may actually be starting to rave.

People do not set out poisoned bait to kill human beings. The kind of bait Shakespeare is referring to is commonly used to kill rats: They are driven mad with thirst or pain and run out of the house to die. One of the reasons the image is so striking is that it implicitly compares people motivated by uncontrolled lust to the lowest, most detested animals. Sonnet 129 is unlike most of Shakespeare’s other sonnets and in fact unlike most other Elizabethan sonnets, which are typically full of references to love, the moon, the stars, and other pleasant things. This strange sonnet on lust has a modern, experimental quality to it which foreshadows the cacophony and deliberately shocking ugliness of much twentieth century art.