Sonnet 138 is one of the most famous of William Shakespeare's sonnets. Making use of frequent puns ("lie" and "lie" being the most obvious), it shows an understanding of the nature of truth and flattery in romantic relationships. The poem has also been argued to be biographical: many scholars have suggested Shakespeare used the poem to discuss his frustrating relationship with the Dark Lady, a frequent subject of many of the sonnets. (To note, the Dark Lady was definitely not Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway.) The poem emphasizes the effects of age and the associated deterioration of beauty, and its effect on a sexual or romantic relationship.
Paraphrase Sonnet 138 begins with the speaker discussing how his love speaks word of truth, but the next line states "I do believe her, though I know she lies." This sets the tone for the rest of the sonnet because he knows that his lover is lying. He chooses to deny it and accept her lie. The line "That she might think me some untutored youth" points to the speaker being self-conscious about his age. He stresses his awareness that his best days are behind him; a truth that his lover knows but ignores. He understands that both are lying to each other for the sake of their relationship to live. When the speaker states, "Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue" he is accepting her lies. The speaker and his lover are hiding their transgression by not bringing to light the issue that they are insecure about, i.e., "Therefore I lie with her and she with me, and in our faults by lies we flattered be." At the end of the sonnet, the speaker and his lover accept their flaws.
Structure Sonnet 138 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form abab cdcd efef gg and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The 6th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: × / × / × / × / × / Although she knows my days are past the best, (138.6) / = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus.
The poem is quite regular metrically. Ironically, line 7, beginning "simply" may be the most metrically complex: it begins with a common metrical variation, the initial reversal, and features (potentially) a rightward movement of the third ictus (resulting in a four-position figure, × × / /, sometimes referred to as a minor ionic): / × × / × × / / × / Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue: (138.7) An initial reversal is potentially present in line 13, and a minor ionic in line 1; however, the frequent emphasis of pronouns in this poem may argue against the latter variation.
The meter demands that line 4's "unlearnèd" be pronounced with three syllables.
Context
The Passionate Pilgrim Sonnet 138 is one of twenty sonnets published in The Passionate Pilgrim (Dark Lady) collection (1599) by Jaggard. In Shakespeare's Sonnets, Carl D. Atkins stresses that although the collection title page reads "By W. Shakespeare", it features a number of poems known to belong to other authors. "Commentators have debated", he states, "whether the version of Sonnet 138 in the Passionate Pilgrim represents an early draft by Shakespeare or a poor memorial reconstruction by someone who read the version later printed in the Quarto (or some other draft)" (340).Atkins, Carl Ed. Shakespeare's Sonnets . Cranbury: Rosemont Publishing & Printing Crop, 2007. Print. John Roe's analysis in the Cambridge collection of Shakespeare's poetry, The Poems, adds a layer of mystery to the sonnet authorship when he mentions the canceled title page of Jaggard's 1612 edition, which bears Heywood's name (58).Roe, John Roe. The Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. First published in 1992. Print.
The Passionate Pilgrim went through two separate printings during 1599. Sonnet 138 is the first poem in The Passionate Pilgrim, followed thereafter by Shakespeare's Sonnet 144.Booth, 476. The poem, as it appeared in 1599, with substantive differences from the 1609 Quarto in italics: 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 untutor'd youth, Unskilful 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 flattering 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 smother'd be.
Similar sonnets The sonnet talks about how lies do not hurt when their purpose is to protect lovers' feelings and preserve relationships. In the sonnet, the speaker knows that his lover is lying about his age, but decides not to make much ado about nothing because he knows her act is dictated by love and concern. The irony is that the speaker is himself aware of the lie while hiding a lie of his own. Gerald Massey's Shakespeare's Sonnets Never Before Interpreted argues that this type of irony is a characteristic of a number of Shakespearean sonnets, particularly Sonnet 96, Sonnet 131, Sonnet 137, Sonnet 142, and Sonnet 147 (357).Massey, Gerald. Shakespeare's Sonnets Never Before Interpreted. London: Longmans, 1866. Print.
The Dark Lady Sonnet 138 is a part of a series of poems written about Shakespeare's dark lady. They describe a woman who has dark hair and dark eyes. She diverges from the Petrarchan norm. "Golden locks" and "florid cheeks" were fashionable in that day, but Shakespeare's lady does not bear those traits.(Danijela Kambraskovic-Sawers. Three themes in one, which wonderous scope affords: Ambiguous Speaker and Storytelling in Shakespeare's Sonnets, Criticism, 49:3 (2007:Summer) p. 294) The lady is shown as being both fair and foul, and both kind and unkind.(Joel Fineman. Shakespeare's Perjurd Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. University of California Press, Berkeley: 1986, p. 17.) Alice F. Moore feels that within these later sonnets the poet is equally as dark as the lady. As the speaker reveals the mistress in her "foulness" and "deceit", he consequently reveals himself. These sonnets are shadowed by the speakers own self-hatred and anger.(Alice F. Moore. Shakespeare's SONNET 138, Explicator, 43:2 (1985:Winter) p.15) However, Joel Fineman believes that the biggest difference between series of the dark lady and the other series of sonnets featuring the young man is that those about the dark lady use a formula of lusty misogyny that is clearly Shakespearean.(Fineman p. 17) Throughout the sonnets, and especially sonnet 138, the lady "comes to occupy this peculiarly charged erotic place ("therefore I lie with her, and she with me,/And in our faults by lies we flattered be").(Fineman p. 17)
The sonnets addressed to the dark lady usually relate the lady with "a disjunction occasioned by verbal duplicity," ("When my love swears that she is made of truth,/I do believe her, though I know she lies").(Fineman p. 17) The language in the dark lady sonnets is some that "one is forced to hear— to hear, that is, as language— functions as a supplementary and confirming, not a disavowing, gloss on what the poet has to say".(Fineman 286) They "conceal praise under the guise of disparagement (Kambascovic-Sawers p. 293). A.L. Rowse believes that the sonnet takes us further into Shakespeare's relationship with the lady. The relationship is both "purely sexual" and "utterly unromantic".(A.L. Rowse. Shakespeare's Sonnets: The Problems Solved. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1973, p. 287) However, it can also be said that the speaker is not attracted to the woman because of her "physical, intellectual, or moral excellence".(Kambascovic-Sawers p. 294) Instead, the attraction is portrayed as being "self-generated, with no basis in 'reality'.(Kambascovic-Sawers p. 294)
Rowse feels that the woman discussed in the sonnet can be identified as the mistress, Emilia. Shakespeare is six years older, and is thus highly conscious of his age. Underneath all the hyprocrisies there is Shakespeare's "honest candour."(Rowse: p. 287) In Shakespeare's Sonnets: The Problems Solved, A. L. Rowse notes that Sonnet 138 shows the "uncompromising realism with which he [Shakespeare] describes it all: it has been said -- rightly-- that there is no woman like Shakespeare's in all the sonnet-literature of the Renaissance. Most of them are abstractions or wraiths; this one is of flesh and blood".(Rowse: p. 287)
Themes and motifs Valerie Traub presents the idea that many sonnets follow a Judeo-Christian idea of procreation as "justification" for heterosexuality. Shakespeare explores more sensual and even explicit ideas in the sonnets that challenge these ideals. Though Sonnet 138 does not vastly differ from this tradition as Shakespeare's sonnets to the young boy this does fall into this contradictory tradition.(Traub, Valerie. "Sex without Issue: Sodomy, Reproduction, and Signification in Shakespeare's Sonnets" Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays. Ed. Schiffer, James. 2001.) Here there Shakespeare references her truth and lies rather than her sensual body showing that he is differing from Christian traditions. Joel Fineman speaks on a similar topic when referencing Shakespeare. "On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd." Fineman states, "his desire is imposed on him, not by God or by Nature, but by poetry itself." Fineman is explaining that Shakespeare is not only challenging Christianity he is examining the forms and ideas of poetry themselves.(Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare's Perjurd Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. University of California Press, Berkeley: 1986.) Shakespeare's emphasis on truth takes away from his emphasis on procreation. J. Bunselmeyer takes it even further and discusses that Shakespeare's puns here begin to negate not only the traditional ideas of Christianity but also the words that are being presented. This contradiction plays on Fineman's idea of the form of poetry.(Bunselmeyer, J. Appearances and Verbal Paradox Sonnets 129 and 138. Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 24, No 1 (winter, 1974) 103-108)
Exegesis Sonnet 138 unveils a paradox that underlines the speaker's personal struggle to come to terms with issues of deceit and trust in love. The sonnet's tone shifts from a recognition of his lover's lie about her age to developing a sense of trust in exchanging the lie. The lady is portrayed as someone insecure about her age in her attempt to defy time and win compassion of her younger lover. The element of irony in this exchange is his reference to her knowledge that his age is already beyond youth. Author of Shakespeare's Sonnets Never Before Interpreted, Gerald Massey, describes the sonnet's irony as "one of a smiling kind" (337).Massey, Gerald. Shakespeare's Sonnets Never Before Interpreted. London: Longmans, 1866. Print.