To say that our modern world is sexualised is not exactly a bold claim. Sabrina Carpenter insinuating giving a blowjob to a Buckingham palace guard at the recent BRIT awards after a miming performance that was basically a striptease is, all things considered, pretty tame for what we now take as normal. Onlyfans girl’s sex marathons make regular appearances in trending bars, and in an internet attention economy the unregulated race to the bottom means that sexualised content is where many things default.
We may complain or object, but in an age in which “morality” is demoted either to social media arguments about politics or something entirely personally relative, each of us has to navigate what exactly is moral in this sexualised world by ourselves. In an age where everything is instantly available and temptation and impulse are the currency of the online world, moderation of value is no longer cultural, it is our own responsibility.
This new internet landscape is new, but sexual dynamics are of course as old as human beings, and so are and have always been the subject of poetry. What underlies the intense allure of sexualised culture is the subject of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129: lust. Here it is in full:
Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd 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.
Sonnet 129 is one of Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady’ sonnets, a set of poems that refer, or so it is speculated, to an affair Shakespeare had with a women of dark hair and appearance, although this is projected rather than known and most scholars see her as an invention of Shakespeare’s imagination. Either way, she stands in opposition to Shakespeare’s Fair Youth, and contrasts the sexual to the spiritual, lust to love.
The language of the first octave of the poem is blunt and visceral, it simply strings words together to describe lust as “perjured, murd’rous, bloody,” “Savage, extreme, rude, cruel,” lust turns reason into bait, and the words drive towards the repeated word that seperate the octave from the final sextet: mad; / Mad.
Yet part of Shakespeare’s brilliance is his ability to employ simple words or phrases that cast something transfiguring across an entire poem. One example of this is Sonnet 60, Shakespeare’s poem about the reality of ageing, which like lust is “cruel,” that Seamus Heaney, riffing on E.M. Forster’s description of A Passage to India, calls “a poem with a hole in the middle.” This is because in the centre of the poem Shakespeare casts in this extraordinary phrase “main of light”: Nativity, once in the main of light, / Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d, / Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight. Heaney describes this brilliantly:
Something visionary happens there in the fifth line. ‘Nativity,’ an abstract noun housed in a wavering body of sound, sets up a warning tremor just before the mind’s eye gets dazzled by ‘the main of light,’ and for a split second, we are in the world of Paradiso. The rest of the poem lives melodiously in a world of discourse but it is this unpredictable strike into the realm of pure being that marks the sonnet with Shakespeare’s extravagant genius.1
So it is in Sonnet 129 that the blunt stream of words whose strung out sequence reads almost like someone in the throws of regret just writing “you stupid stupid idiot” to themselves, “expense of spirit” is magically cast over the entire sequence. Unnoticed, Shakespeare has slipped you into that territory that takes what follows out of the mundane and, in Heaney’s phrase, into the realm of pure being.
The structure of a sonnet, a form originally Italian, is usually octave/volta/sextet, meaning a line of eight and a line of six broken by a “volta,” which means turn, in which the poem shifts into its theme or introduces something new. Here the second part is broken, again, by the double emphasis of ‘mad’ and the final six lines then introduce a new set of words that return to the net cast by ‘spirit’: quest, bliss, joy, dream…heaven.
Shakespeare of course lived in a piously religious time, and while we know little of his personal beliefs, his genius was in his ability to employ religious words that can so easily be saddled with cliches to profound effect. The work of the poem is subtle, but Shakespeare is laying out in twelve lines the great vision of Dante, that lust and incontinence takes you to hell, while his spiritual love for Beatrice is that, as Shelley put it: “by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause.”2
Arguing in the modern world that lust is a religious sin is hardly going to have much success. To us, religious sin is a form of repression that the liberalism of our society has rejected in order to succeed. Perhaps there is some truth to this. But Shakespeare is not trying to trick us, nor to engage in pious religiousness. His genius lies in the ability of his work to transcend both times, the religious and the apathetic. His breaks into Paradiso turn the poem not into a clumsy claim about the naughtiness of sex, but an attempt to fracture the banality of the regret that lust induces with split second visions of what the possibility of love signifies. Like any brilliant poetry, it functions as a kind of reminder, an unforgetting of what “All this the world well knows; yet none knows well.” As such, it is also a reminder of the residing “extravagant genius” of Shakespeare himself that his work still speaks to us down the centuries.
Heaney, Finder Keepers; Faber/Faber 2002
Shelley, A Defence of Poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry