by Ask a room of readers which of Shakespeare’s sonnets is the greatest and the same three answers come back every time: Sonnet 18, the summer’s day; Sonnet 116, the marriage of true minds; Sonnet 73, the yellow leaves. Those answers are accurate the way election returns are accurate. Ask which sonnet is the most beautiful and the most honest at once, and the room goes quiet, because that question is a confession booth. What comes back tells you what the reader wants and what the reader is willing to admit. Mine now is Sonnet 138, the one that begins with a woman swearing and a man pretending. I say now because it was not always so, and I would not trust a reader whose answer never changes. The road here runs through changes in tone and taste, in wants and abilities, in hopes I no longer have, and the road is the subject of this essay. A reader’s favorite sonnet is a diary entry with the lock broken off.
The popular answers earned their popularity, and an honest account starts there. Sonnet 116 first, because it is the one read at weddings:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
That poem is effective because it builds a definition of love inside the architecture of a vow. “Admit impediments” echoes the charge in the marriage service of the Book of Common Prayer, and the poem proceeds like a lawyer who is also a musician. The trouble is the honesty. A definition that cannot lose cannot win either. “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” rules out, in advance, every piece of evidence an actual marriage will produce, and the closing couplet is a bet no one can collect. Sonnet 116 is beautiful the way a cathedral is beautiful, and honest the way a cornerstone is honest: laid before the building existed, never once asked to bear weight. None of this takes the poem away from anyone. It has carried more weddings than any poem in English, and it deserves them. Greatness was never the dispute.
When I was twenty my answer was 116, or on certain days 18. What I wanted was permanence: to be chosen and then kept, with a poem that promised in writing that keeping was possible. At that age taste runs to melody and ability runs to memorization. Hope was the belief that the right sentence, said to the right person, could hold a life in place. I copied “Love’s not Time’s fool” into letters I sent, and into one or two I never sent. I read the sonnets the way other people read psalms, and a reader in that condition will always choose the poem that promises over the poem that knows.
In my late twenties I found the dark lady poems and decided honesty mattered more than beauty, which is the kind of thing a person decides before understanding either. Sonnet 129 became the answer: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action,” ending with the coldest knowledge in the sequence: “All this the world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” What I wanted then was for the poem to say the worst first, before anyone else could say it about me. That is armor. Confession performed for effect is theater in honesty’s clothing. My hearing improved and my patience thinned to nothing; those years made me a better reader and a harder person to be with. I had mistaken severity for candor, and the mistake cost me a decade of reading the dark lady sonnets as indictments when several of them are something harder.
The standard seminar answer to the honest question is Sonnet 130, and for a while it was mine too:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
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.
Grant it everything. It is effective because it runs the whole inventory of poetic flattery, eyes, lips, skin, hair, cheeks, breath, voice, walk, and declines each item in plain words, and because its couplet lands only after twelve lines of refusal have made sincerity expensive. It is not effective for this question because it risks nothing. Nobody bleeds in 130. Its honesty is courtship with clean hands, truth told in the service of a compliment. It is still the poem I hand to people who think poems lie. The poem is funny besides, and a joke is a cushion. Measure what it admits, black wires, reeking breath, against what it never mentions: whether she is faithful, whether he is, whether either means to stay. That silence is where 138 lives.
In my forties and fifties death entered the reading. For years my answer was 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang,” a poem honest about the body in a way the young cannot afford to be. Sonnet 71 goes further: “Lest the wise world should look into your moan, / And mock you with me after I am gone” admits what no elegy admits, that grief is performed for an audience and the audience mocks. The want in those years was to be remembered accurately; later it softened into the wish to spare the other person. It took me the better part of a decade to learn the difference. The ability that arrived was rereading: the same line at fifty-five means what it could not mean at twenty-five, and the distance between those readings is data.
Then, some years back, rereading the sequence straight through in order, the way you would read a novel, I came to 138 and it stopped me. I put the book down, made coffee, came back. What I want from a love poem now is company in the truth, and a verdict is the opposite of company. Here it is as Thomas Thorpe printed it in the 1609 quarto:
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue;
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
The second gift of 138 is stranger. The poem changed over time too. In 1598 Francis Meres praised Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets” passing among his private friends; in 1599 the publisher William Jaggard, apparently without permission, printed two of them at the front of a miscellany he called The Passionate Pilgrim. The first poem in that book is “When my love swears,” a decade before Thorpe’s quarto, in a different text:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unskillful in the world’s false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although I know my years be past the best,
I, smiling, credit her false-speaking tongue,
Outfacing faults in love with love’s ill rest.
But wherefore says my love that she is young?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is a soothing tongue,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I’ll lie with love, and love with me,
Since that our faults in love thus smothered be.
John Roe, the Cambridge editor, holds that Jaggard’s version is a reconstruction from memory by someone who heard the poem recited; Colin Burrow, the Oxford editor, leaves open the early draft that Shakespeare later revised. Set the texts side by side, though, and every difference runs one way. The 1599 poem smiles: “I, smiling, credit her false-speaking tongue” becomes “Simply I credit.” The early couplet keeps its accounts in the abstract, “Therefore I’ll lie with love, and love with me”; the later puts a person in the bed, “I lie with her and she with me.” The early ending is a burial, “smothered”; the later ending is a fitting room, “flattered.” Where the early poem asks why she claims to be young, the later asks the harder thing: why does she not admit she is unjust, and why do I not admit I am old. If Shakespeare revised it, he revised from wit toward weight, from an abstraction toward a woman. If Jaggard’s text is the corruption, memory corrupted toward the smile. Either way, even the author of the most honest sonnet in English needed time to get the honesty right. I find that comforting, and I am not ashamed to say so.
The opening splits belief from knowledge and holds both at once: “I do believe her though I know she lies.” The line has a hinge in the middle; the two halves are two rooms in one house, and he pays rent in both. Belief is an act performed on purpose, nightly. It is also reciprocal casting: he plays the untutored youth so she can play the faithful woman, each hands the other a part, and the play is the marriage, as anyone married a long time will recognize. “Vainly” works twice, in vain and in vanity; “Simply” works twice, plainly and foolishly. By the eighth line the poem names its condition: “On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.” Suppressed: the truth stays alive, held down under a weight two people agreed to carry. And “on both sides” is a fairness rare in this sequence, where the blame usually lands on her.
Midway, the poem asks its only two questions: “But wherefore says she not she is unjust? / And wherefore say not I that I am old?” One question aimed in two directions: why do we never say what we both know. The poem answers by wardrobe: “O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust.” A habit is a practice and a garment; love’s best clothing is the appearance of trust laid over the real like cloth over a body still warm. Then the stumble: “And age in love loves not to have years told.” Told means counted and told means confessed, and the line trips over its own feet because that is where the speaker’s own lie comes due. I love that stumble. It is the one place the poem loses its composure, and it loses it exactly where the speaker loses his. The couplet collects everything. “Therefore I lie with her and she with me”: the two meanings of lie, to deceive and to lie down, meet in bed at last. “And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” Passive voice, the passive that matters: we are flattered; the lies do it to us and we allow it. Inside the fault is where the flattery lives, which is why leaving would fix nothing.
Beauty deserves its own defense, since it was half the question. This is not the beauty of 18, all summer and gold; it is the beauty of fit. No wasted parts; every line bears weight. Nearly every line is end-stopped; the effect is terms being stated, clause by clause, a contract read aloud by someone tired enough to mean every clause. Then the couplet chimes inward: I and lie, she and me and we and be, two pronouns and one double verb pressed into a single chord. I have tested this on my own voice, which is no kind of instrument, and the poem survives me every time. Read it aloud and nothing in it sings; everything in it holds. Beauty that sings is common in the sonnets. Beauty that holds is rare, and it is the only kind that can be trusted with weight.
The honesty needs defending as well, because the poem has enemies on both flanks. The first charge is cynicism, and there is truth in it: the tone is dry to the point of ash. Here is the answer. Cynicism leaves. This poem stays. He audits the whole arrangement, names the lies on both sides, and climbs back into the bed. The second charge is cruelty toward the woman, and there is truth in that too: elsewhere in the sequence the poems about her are cruel, and the 1599 text of this sonnet is uglier than the one we have. Its answer sits in the revision, which splits the fault down the middle and hands her the same weapon he carries. She lies, he lies, both know, both stay. The third charge is biographical, that none of this can be trusted because no one knows who she was. True, and beside the point. The poem’s honesty is structural and portable, available to any two people who have outlasted their first account of each other.
What the poem says is the one sentence long love never says aloud: I know, and I am still here. The feeling sits in a million beds and owns almost no sentences. Sonnet 116 gets the weddings, because weddings are promises; 138 belongs to the twenty-fifth anniversary, when some promises have been kept and some have not, and both people know which is which. It treats love as something two adults build out of materials that include their own failures, and it understands that flattery exchanged knowingly, nightly, is a form of tenderness. A poem is reprinted every time someone reads it aloud, and each reading brings this emotion back into the world, the one with no other public language.
So the record, kept honestly. Wants moved from permanence to exoneration to accurate memory to company. Tone: devout, savage, wry, level, and level is a tone you hold on purpose. Taste: melody, force, wit, fit. Abilities grew from memorization to parsing to rereading to the hardest of them, hearing a pun as mercy instead of evasion; patience was lost and earned back. None of it happened on schedule, and none of it felt like progress while it was happening. The devout reflex still fires at weddings, where I reach for 116 like everyone else, because a wedding is no place for 138, and knowing that is part of knowing what 138 is. Hope traveled farthest: at twenty I hoped to be kept; at forty I hoped to be known; now I hope to be known and kept anyway, and to keep in return. The poem sat on the page for four centuries. I moved. The only regression worth confessing is the years spent treating honesty as a weapon when it was a shelter all along.
The two texts of the poem have shared a book for four hundred years like two people who have shared a bed long enough to stop performing. One smiles. One does not. Both stay. Somewhere tonight, in a bed off every page, two people will turn toward the wall and then back toward each other, and neither will say the sentence this poem says, because the poem has already said it for them: I know, and I am still here. The truth between them is not dead. It is suppressed, alive, and lying down with them, keeping them warm.
Texts of the 1609 quarto and The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) follow the Folger Shakespeare Library editions.
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