Set X: Runes 127-140
The Perverse “Mss.” (I)

          By introducing the infamous Dark Lady or Perverse Mistress, texts in Sets X and XI add new challenges and a puzzling dominant “character” (often prefigured earlier) to Q’s implicit dramatic interrelationships among poet/persona, friend/auditor, and “mistress”—the last a witty perversion of several centuries’ worth of idealized females who were good at making the poems of European males drip in drool.
          While various hints in the Runes point to wife Anne, daughter Susanna, Mistress Alchemy, or even granddaughter Elizabeth as prototype(s) for this odd “female”—and while there may even have been some other “real” Dark Lady—the Mistress, I’m sure, is essentially figurative, a conceit for Will’s own torturous contrivances, for the poems themselves and especially the “peer-verse” Runes: The Mistress is Q’s Mysteries. Such overlaid coterie puns as “ms(s.),” “mystery sighs,” “ms. duress,” “ms. distress,” “ms. dress,” “misty heiress,” and “mystery see ye” help in some measure to decode Will’s cryptic assertions, heavy with “her” voice. The “mysteries,” too, are in part the poet’s guttural and suppressed vocabulary, which we have to work hard to make audible.

          Though proving any theory about Q seems elusive, readers who broach the late Q poems reading “mistress” as “Q texts” will see how such a coterie insight opens up meaning and veers all the Q texts nearer sense. Commentaries on individual texts show some ways the Mistress/Mysteries conceit works in given cases—and Sonnets 127ff. can hereafter be similarly reconstrued at will. Because close variants of Sonnets 138 (in this set) and 144 (in Set XI) had appeared in 1599 in The Passionate Pilgrim and because these two texts thread across the horizontal warp of both sets, it seems likely to me that Sets X and XI were unitary products of the 1590s, originating as entertainment for Southampton’s circle and others, the same “sugared sonnets” that we know were circulating “among [Will’s] private friends” before 1598.

          By 1606-09 when, I deduce, Will reworked these two sets to cap his Megasonnet scheme, he had come to make them serve the cycle as a perverse “vertical” couplet—a close that seemed, in his numbers box diagram, to “walk upon the ground” on two stemmy legs (see Sonnet 130.12) while showing a substantive “turn,” as a closing couplet might in a single text.
          Another purpose these couplet sets served in their new Q setting was to mask the homophile odor of the overt Sonnets (so unconventional for being love poems written mostly to a man) with good-old-boy misogyny and winking innuendoes about some shared, down-and-dirty mistress.

          The antithesis of light and lyric beauty, Will’s Mistress inhabits a siren’s world of darkness and is medial between poet and auditor. She is “that art that makes my heart to groan,” wounding both poet and auditor (see Sonnet 133.1-2). She is, or can be, “made,” though punningly she is also often a “hymn.” As a shared romancer, she toys with both Will’s and the friend’s affections, mistreats both by being temperamental and nearly impenetrable, and effectively holds both their futures and reputations in her manipulative hands. She is a creature of black (ink), though “in the old days” color would have been the norm; she is “c[o]unted”—fair or not—as women are (see Sonnet 127.1). Her voice is a “wiry concord that confounds the ear” (Sonnet 128.4). She is “ablest in proof and proofed, and very wo-” (Sonnet 129.11). Her “‘I’s” are nothing like the sun” (Sonnet 130.1), for printed “I’s” are straight and black, while the sun is round and bright (like an “O”). (Will’s gendered ambiguity about phallic “I’s” and pudendal “O’s” always defies reducibility.) Will’s “mystery sighs are nothing like this: One,” for everything in Q is multiple.

          A few details from particular texts may show how Will’s puns, especially about writing and printing, typically conflate “ms(s).” and “Mistress.” In Rune 135, “my Mysteries’ [printed] ‘I’s’ are rune-black” (1). “Two be so tickled they would change their state” (2) may (despite OED) allude to printing and the shift of “state” from ms. to book. “Made” (3) puns on “maid” while combining ideas of “madness” and “craftiness” that are echoed in “ravin[g]” (1) and madde (14). The “speaking” mistress is a product of the “[ink]well” (4, see13). Will’s “heart / art” is to be imprisioned in “thy steel bosom’s word/ward”—suggesting “pen” and printing apparatus. “Water” (9) suggests ink, and “raine” puns again on “rune.” “Number” (10) can mean “verse text.” Line 11 puns “my art [merd], th’ ink(y) thought, a several plot,” suggesting divergent “story lines.” “Unjust” (12) varies what may be a printing term (echoing, e.g., “justified text”) to suggest “irregular.” “Well” (13), a pudendal play befitting a “mistress,” puns on “inkwell.” And “Dis-pair” (14) puns on “separate two [texts]” and "hellish pair” (since Dis is the capital of Dante’s Hell). The “she-knot” (12) of the text, then, is the “mistress” text herself, crazy mystery-sighs with ink-black “I’s,” a creature merging in Will’s mind with the auditor/muse’s own features (6). The line-pun “Then in thin, umber [black lines] let me pass untold [i.e., unrecognized, metrically uncounted]” (10) restates the phrase “my Mysteries’ ‘I’s’ are raven black” (1).

          Rune 137—however one “ill-wrests the text—offers another specific example of rampant Mistress/Mysteries puns: The creature of 1-4 works best as an analogue and conceit for the text itself, which is both appealing and “not [created] fair” (1). Line 2 suggests perusing something on the page; “In proof” (3) suggests “in print”; and “ill-wresting” (14) suggests wrongly interpreting (OED). By reconstructing the sequestered part of the poet’s project, one of the “mysteries,” the auditor can “add to thy Will” (9), but if no champion embraces and “takes hold” (10), the work may be illusory (11). Puns such as “Whore keeps me” (7) and the ambiguous "she" (13) also suggest the perverse text. The last line puns, “Now this ill-wresting, world [or, ‘wrong interpretation whirled’]: Is G-rown [the G-line, the archaic ‘ge-’ in ‘gerowned’] forbade?” Such “row” plays echo the one in the famous line “My Mistress, when she walks, treads on the G-row end [i.e., end of line 7],” “…on thick rune (rown/round),” and “…on the ground [as in ‘ground bass,’ a running continuo line undergirding a melody]” (see Sonnet 130.12).

          Set X shows other features besides the “new” Mistress. Substantively, it houses the infamous Will-punning sonnets (Nos. 135-136), two texts that cut across the 14 runes, initiating their playful sestets.
          Some details are more technical or pictographic. The set’s last line, e.g., “goes wide” into the blank space at bottom right, punning “Be arty, nice, straight (Burden aye is straight), though th’ web, rude art (our ode-art), goes wide” (Sonnet 140.14). As if to balance this righthand deviancy, one “Anne” line “goes wide” to the left, concurrent with the puns “Anne did hence this slander ascertain…” and “Eying, did Hen see this slander?” (Sonnet 131.14).

     In times gone by, dark features were not thought attractive, black ink was not always beautifully metered, illuminated books were valued more highly than those in black ink, and halftones got omitted in the mathematics of musical scales.
     How often when you, my dark lyric, play music—
     expending spirit in this shameful waste—
  4 my mistress’ eyes (my mystery-sighs, my mss. “I’s”) seem antithetical to the sun—or Son.
     Dominant and unrelenting, you’re just as much the tyrant, so, just as you are,
     I love your vision, which (taking pity on me)
     curses that heart (or art) that makes mine lament.
  8 So, I’ve now admitted that my heart is yours:
     Whoever “hath her way,” you have your William,
     even if your soul rebukes you when I approach.
     Love, you blind fool, what are you doing to my eyes (or to the “I’s” on my pages)
12 when my mistress swears herself to be the whole truth?
     O, don't ask me to rationalize my errors—or to set them up in printed lines.
     Match your tyranny with wisdom: No pressure. No printed copies.

     Whether you call her Whore or not, it wasn’t Beauty I saw
     upon that Cross whose effects—mortal wounds inflicted on Innocence—
     happen after conscious initiative and which, prior to action, are physical desires not acted upon;
  4 her lips—far less “read” than the coral reefs under the sea—are of the color
     favored by creatures made cruel by pride in their own beauty
     and familiarity with your heart. Torture me with disregard,
     my friend, of a sort that wounds me deeply—and me,
  8 myself, and I still remain obliged to do your will,
     and Will to boot, and Will in overabundance.
     Swear to this blind fool (or to Cupid or to some blind fool reading this) that I was your Will
     and that the sum total of all my selves’ visual faculties cannot be trusted for accuracy.
12 I accept what the perverse creature says, though I know she lies.
     My heart (and my art), burdened by your cruel lack of sympathy
     and excessive disdain, experiences mute tediousness that tries my patience.

     Just now inky blackness, off-and-on the heir to beauty, is
     at hand as you, in a leisurely, gentlemanly fashion, finger your options in these mss.;
     the black beauty (if not the whole of what you delve into) is spurious, bloody, guilt-ridden.
  4 As sure as snow is white, the bosom of this “perverse mistress” is defiled!
     For, as you Well know—my dear, doting heart—two entities
     have dressed in inkiness here, appropriating darkness like loving mourners.
     Isn’t that enough to torture me, a single poet?
  8 I’ll give up my honest self, these runes, so that my other “mine” of mine, the visible sonnets,
     an adequate if also vexing ms., is what I become—
     a sphere in which people already acknowledge my presence.
     Eyes—mine and everybody’s—and the public texts, too, know what and where beauty is.
12 In order that beauty can go on regarding me as the ignorant youth I appear to be because of of all the “errors” in my public texts,
     speak ill of me, but go on looking at me favorably,
     so that I don’t ever acquire such rhetoric as real personal sorrow might inspire (and thus be revealed as fully literate).

     131. Over-Partial Looks

     Just because any and every writer has affected “naturalness,” now that I’m able to write two plausible poems at the same time
     do you think I envy those Johns that pop up
     and are praised only to be immediately despised and forgotten—like quickly wilting roses?
  4 I’ve seen it all. I have seen artful roses artfully shimmering in variegated colors.
     Some poets still can write “roses damasked, red and white” without irony. One look at you
     and it’s not nature’s bright morning sun that shines
     but rather your own cruel eye that transports me from myself.
  8 But you don’t intend that I, Will, in such captivation, lose my freedom—which I love.
     If you wilt—like a rose—or if you, a generous man of capacious desires, agree to it,
     I, Will, will bring your love’s treasure to completion,
     whether or not your admirers make you vain, or my readers under-read or misread my texts.
12 In this situation, given your own vanity, you may assume your love thinks me too young,
     and thus you may say you love “elsewhere”; but, as I see it,
     it would be better if I could talk you into something sensible. (Let me show you personally how these verses work, so you won’t take them as dashed-off and amateurish.)

     132. The Bay Where All Men Ride

     Decorating ugliness with the mask of art
     to caress the tender palm of your hand,
     dementia sought you out—and instantly found you.
  4 But I see in the brazen face of such crazy art no predictably fair roses.
     Your face doesn’t create that effect; to activate love’s blushes
     is more aptly the prerogative of the sky at dawn.
     And you have subsequently clasped my other persona, next in line, harder—
  8 for you are grasping, and that self (unlike that other, crazy female side of me) is considerate and pliable.
     Agree to hide my purpose in yours and let me love you, not just once but over and over:
     I fill it full of “Will’s.” Let my singular affection
     find security in your hands, in the crowded harbor of your attraction.
12 Although your eyes see the face of a self past its prime,
     dear heart (or art), try not to look away;
     even if you are not to love me, enjoy lying to me on that subject.

     133. Forgèd Hooks and Swallowed Bait

     Sweet beauty will lack a name and shrine
     as long as my ineffective voice, which should speak maturely,
     goes on despising the arcane wisdom of the ages as much as a fish gags on swallowed bait
  4 and as long as some perfumes exude more delight than my breath does.
     I will not go so far as to say that my lips are in error
     any more than I would say that Hesperus errs in ushering in the night.
     I feel isolated from him, from myself, and from you.
  8 The evening star has learned to set down my thoughts, but only as a dependable proxy.
     Will Will at one remove seem “right gracious”?
     We show our capability easily in matters of great import.
     Why have you snared me with hooks forged from something as trivial as deceitful glances?
12 Basically, I blame the lying tongue of falsehood.
     What? Do you need to wound me with cleverness when your physical strength—
     like that of boldly rash old men who show defiance at the point of death—is at your disposal?

     135. A Several Plot

     There, up front, my mistress’ eyes—like the mss. “I’s” here—are raven-black,
     both of them. Excited, they would show color of the sort
     that aggressive passion and conquest generate. When she is in that heightened state,
  4 I love to hear her voice. Still, even as things are now (I know the well I write from,
     and, for sure, this black ink shows truth, I swear)
     as those two mourning eyes merge with the image of your gloomy face
     and imprison my heart in the chamber of your steel bosom,
  8 you’re sure to take the full limit that is your beauty’s right.
     The sea, an infinite liquid well, goes on receiving even more rain;
     just so, let me join the multitude unnoticed, a small drop in the inky depths.
     Why should my heart see that merger as a class action or subversive plot?
12 For whatever reason my ms. fails to admit her injustices,
     let me overlook yours—ah, my love knows that wellspring—
     for if I lost the hope you give me, I would go mad.

     136. I One Must Be

     Her eyes—or printed “I’s,” or “Aaaay’s”—garbed so in black look like mourners,
     and closeness to them cuts down on dancing—
     immoderately affecting anyone who knows or has known or seeks to know them, seeming remote from any position one takes toward them.
  4 A far more musical sound comes from
     a thousand groans! But, remembering your face,
     Oh, let me imagine it congruent with your heartfelt sentiments toward me, and let me imagine those feelings as a wellspring of generosity.
     Next, at that point your dear heart could post the money to bail out my poor one,
  8 you usurer, one who lends everything
     and, already rich, earns further interest—
     even though I must remain only one name in your ledger,
     a fact my heart accepts. The whole world is ordinary,
12 so why do I not admit the physical decline of myself,
     the world’s plaything? Appearances have worked against me
     and, with me reduced to madness, might do the same to you.

     137. Our Fingers Walk with Gentle Gait

     Perusing this creature who, not created beautiful but perhaps not lacking in beauty,
     a ms. scanned with measured strides of fingers,
     an ultimate joy in print, an arrogant woe personified—
  4 I admit that what anyone’s eyes have seen here is not a goddess moving along.
     Viewers supporting each other, I ask you to embrace me as I embrace you, saying that you
     will mourn for me, since melancholy becomes your face and is good for your soul.
     Whoever supports me and perpetuates my memory, let my heart (and art) protect him—
  8 following a friend to whom I’m indebted for what he has done for me;
     Thus, already having Will’s riches, you get more of them, and gain a mutual commitment.
     Since nothing now holds me, take hold, if you please;
     otherwise, my eyes tend to see this text and tell me that it doesn’t exit. I envision the future support of an empathic reader but simultaneously doubt it will ever come to be.
12 O, the best habit of love is its apparent trust of others;
     thus love, my own affirmative hopes, and even this perverse ms. all help deflect my enemies,
     now that this misapprehending world, ready to find the worst in things, has gotten so bad.

     139. Saucy Jacks

     They go on, garbed in black and posturing that way, suiting their mournful condition,
     because cocky Johns enjoy such ostentatious weeping so much,
     advertising their condition to the world, however superficially.
  4 Even so, by heaven, I think my love just as rare:
     You’re colorfully arrayed, dark only in your deeds.
     That leads me to swear that Beauty herself is black
     and that you intend to keep her in mourning; as for me, a writer penned in you, my subject,
  8 I’ve lost my song—you’ve captured him, and me.
     Don’t let any good-looking, wrongly-motivated courtiers argue me to death;
     make just my name, Will, your beloved, and go on loving it.
     My sentiment and vision have misapprehended truth;
12 that explains why I misrepresent things. About your love (your love is with me
     still), don’t falsify anything. (I speak the truth on that subject.) If you just understand that I can never be destroyed,
     you make it so that I can’t be, and so that you yourself can’t be lied about.

Set XI: Runes 141-154
The Perverse “Mss.” (II)

         This the second of the Perverse Mistress sets pairs with Set X to comprise a formal “couplet” close to Will’s grand design, Q’s Megasonnet; texts in Set XI (at the far right in that imaginative construct) effectively add “‘unstressed’ syllables” across the board, packing the structure full.

         Readers have long recognized that the last 28 sonnets in Q are somehow of a different order from the rest. As a further terminal add-on to the predominant Dark Lady materials in Sets X-XI, the last two overt sonnets in the last set function visually on the spread as a “couplet” close, exhibiting a conventional shift of subject matter in textual units 13-14, and concurrently rounding off the whole of Q with a bit of allusive formality.
         In fact, the conventionally mythological materials about Cupid and Diana in Sonnets 153-154, which have been critically lamented as a lapse, exert a strong substantive influence on the 14 runes that emerge in Set XI, cutting across all the runic texts in strategic final positions. The magic of contextual significations—and especially of pre-positioned pronouns pointing downward to elements in the runic couplets—allows many thematic variations in Set XI, not all of them with a Cupid/Diana tinge.

         Runes 141 and 142, as examples, seem momentarily to erase the concept that Will’s “mistress” automatically means his “mysteries,” the Q texts, but do not shift firmly into mythological gear either. Overall, the “different” subject matter in Sonnets 153-154 has the practical effect on the set of generating variety, especially in what “she” can mean in the runes. In Rune 141, e.g., the “careful housewife” conceit dominates—perhaps a kenning for Will himself, running back and forth between Sonnets and Runes, as if between husband and lover. Still, the notion that “she” means “mistress/mysteries” is pervasive enough throughout Sets X-XI to serve as an assumed hypothesis for any reader unless contextual evidence in a given rune points in some other direction. The Cupid/Diana stuff, for one thing, triggers a good bit about “brands” as quills.
         Like the “couplet” pair 153-154, Sonnet 145—with its perversely tetrameter lines—has across-the-board effects in Set XI, if only to add one shortened line to every rune.
         Rune 142 wittily butts a “stuttering” six-stressed line (Sonnet 146.2) up against one of these tetrameter lines to generate an ironic “regularity” in the linked lines, showing one of hundreds of instances where authorized “error” proves playfully functional. In this particular case, given the reiterated content “my sinful earth” (Sonnet 146.1-2, punning “err-theme”), one reads the “error” as a mea culpa in the medieval tradition—a reminder that only God, and certainly not Will, creates perfection.

         Sonnet 144 here has gone far toward defining received opinions about the “love triangle” in Shakespeare’s sonnets—poet, male friend, perverse mistress. Reading the text in the light of what we now know about the suppressed runes allows other ways to view the implicit dramatic situation that frames the Q texts.
        As usual, Will’s own self-imposed predicament seems to be the dominant subject of the set, if indeed it has one. Notable in the runes of this set are the “numbers” reference (to 28) in Rune 146.12 and the re-assertion in Rune 151 of the theme of immortality through verse.

     141. Cupid Asleep

     I do not love you purely or conscientiously. I look on you and
     love you licentiously—and thus despise your dear virtue.
     As covertly as a discreet housewife darts between
  4 two lovers, I divide my time between sources both of comfort and despair—
     between two lips (analogues for these paired texts) that love’s own hand has created to make
     for me a poor substitute for a soul, a focal center for my sinful earth:
     My love is like an anguished fever that goes on burning!
  8 O me! Why do my love-driven eyes see what they see!
     Can you, O cruel beloved, my perverse rune-project, say I do not love you?
     O, what Power gives you such amazing dominance?
     Love is too young to understand absolute commitment.
12 My love for you, as you know, makes me act (in these poems) like a false-speaking
     Cupid who has fallen asleep, his love-torch laid aside—
     the little love-god lying asleep for once (and telling lies, in effect, even in his sleep).

     142. A Heart-Inflaming Brand

     Before anyone might have a chance to detect a thousand faults in you—
     actually despising my own rhetorical errors, based on unnatural affection—
     a distracting arrow, shot by the one of the maidens of the huntress Diana, broke away
  4 (feathered shafts—analogues for quills—like spirits still insinuate my presence)
     and seemed, as it hissed through the air and escaped heavenward, to be saying, I hate my
     sinful earth (mea culpa, I’ve botched my metrics here), all the rebel powers lined up
     in front of you, and whatever exacerbates
  8 blindness of the sort that makes humanity’s high-reaching aims poor,
     as I, fighting suicidally against my own interests, participate with you
     in a bumbling enterprise—my loyalty and the skills it triggers being destined to bring down
     no known target over the hill. Duty and obligation typically grow out of love,
12 but you appear doubly disadvantaged in swearing to our mutual obligations.
     Thus one of Diana’s huntresses gained a decidedly phallic advantage when she discovered,
     lying (flaccid?) by Cupid’s side, his heart-searing arrow. (She arced it high and away, bearing its message to pierce some unknown heart—or none at all.)

     143. The Better Angel

     It’s only my heart, not my mind, that, loving what appears despicable,
     (O, how much more blessed is your condition than mine!)
     discards her babe—this bastard offspring you see, bereft—and runs like a fleet messenger
  4 toward a better angel, a man who’s quite handsome.
     I address myself, long the victim of unproductive suffering for my heart’s (and art’s) sake:
     Why do you languish and suffer emptiness in your breast,
     drawing nourishment from what’s sick and wrong?
  8 To put it differently, if others still have good sense, where has mine run off to?
     Do I not contemplate my condition—my heart, my judgment, my art—when I’ve neglected
     my duplicitous undertaking (or sexual coupling)? Let my true sight follow its inclination,
     then, gentle cheater—and don’t urge me, yourself, to go astray,
12 your bed-vow broken in actuality, and new faith violated.
     At this point the “gentle cheater’s” love-kindling fire quickly dampened (or arced upward)
     while many (or “man-y”?) nymphs vowed this: to keep their lives chaste (or “chased”).

     145. The Fairest Votary

     Neither, my pretty Sonnets, do my ears enjoy the lyrics you sing—
     or, if a tune delights, it’s not from your lips
     as long as my perverse ms., my “female evil,” has a wailing child that preoccupies her attention and keeps her running, she herself locked into the printer’s frame.
  4 Threatening to dominate and destroy me quickly, this perverse mistress
     appeared to me in a direct and moving scene of forgiveness.
     Why are the printer’s bill and other costs so high for a situation that allows such brief visits
     of my reason—the good doctor that alleviates my feverish love
  8 at times when what my misguided eyes see looks attractive?
     Pretty Sonnets, do others despise you whom I call my friend?
     Who gives you this “things are getting worse” line? How did you merit my progressive perversity? Where did you gain the grace to put a becoming face on such badness?
     If I reject you and your songs, or even reveal all your truths, I betray myself.
12 But why do I, doubly perjured in all this duplicity, blame you at all—
     you who first borrowed from this holy fire of love,
     as its fairest devotee, to carry the torch for me?

     146. Base Touches

     Rough affection—prone to base touches
     that have profaned lips (and other body ornaments)—
     tries rhetorically to ensnare my “better angel,” who’s busy, attentive, and careful,
  4 and in doing so drives her away,
     all the while criticizing and accusing me by saying, “You exercise your sugar’d tongue
     inflating yourself and creating that doomed house of cards you call your Sonnets,
     angry that your prescriptions lack the power to order reality!”
  8 How can anyone disagree with her?
     I fawn over the same creature that you, my reader, now glare down upon in disapproval,
     so that, amid the very refuse you’ve rejected (but also helped to co-create),
     my nobler nature rather than my grosser self seems the real danger to the state.
12 When I starting talking “20”—saying I’m young, bragging about my endowment or sexual conquests, finishing this 20th text in these paired sets—I’m the biggest liar of all
     with an endless lively heat before me to endure,
     one that thousands of true hearts (and erect “hards”) before me have kept blazing.

     Neither taste nor smell wants to be solicited
     to bond people in purely prurient attractions as often as my senses once inclined
     to go after something advancing before a pious “she” whose name I only hint at here.
  4 There was enough sense-baiting je ne sais quoi to corrupt my saintly side. Thoughts about giving in to fleshly desire
     triggered tendentious advice, preacherly wisdom of the usual sort:
     The rhetorical question about whether worms might be sole heirs to my physical excess
     has left me as a concern, and, removed from the past I’ve described, I approve
  8 of its passing. Now “love” to me just denotes “inkwell”—not pudendum.
     Right? If you’re looking at me with disapproval, won’t you at least agree I’m productive? (If you lower yourself onto me, you’ll detect an energetic expense.)
     I am so powerful and authoritatively skillful, such an expert, that
     my soul tells my body to do what it wants
12 because my only vows now are pledges to abuse you:
     Thus has grown a seething bath, a warm effusion that still tries men
     and even tests the Big Gun of heated lust.

     148. The Sensual Feast

     Anyone can see that private, indiscriminate acts of fellatio with you
     have effectively robbed the beds of others, taking what’s due them.
     Not desiring a poor baby to be constantly tended to,
  4 tempting a masculine creature’s purity with her foul pride—
     and it being properly taught until it got “taut”—th’ hussy knew exactly when to welcome
     your discharge, swallowing it—and thus your offspring—up. Is this your body’s end?
     Desire is a death that medicine can’t cure.
  8 Love’s vision is less accurate than just about anybody’s. Experience
     revenge against me with your sensual moaning,
     you whose worst is to my mind still better than anybody else’s best.
     Go ahead and be triumphant in love; the body needs no further motive and never waits on distant logic,
12 and all of my sure trust in you is no match for
     love’s exotic diseases. An all-powerful cure
     used to be found in sleep, before a virgin’s groping hand disarmed that defense.

     My rational but not my sensual faculties can
     be governed. I love you the same way you love others who aren’t interested in you—
     I see you so busy running after something that’s trying to get away.
  4 And whether or not my angel has turned into a devil
     I despise, my experience with that “end” has altered my life by giving me other goals;
     thus, my soul, you subsist on what’s left after my earlier physical losses.
     Now that my mind is past anxiety, I’m past the point of medical or pastoral care.
  8 Oh, how can a lover’s eye see clearly? (How can an unruly erection be upright in choosing its target?)
     What’s left for me to care about in myself? How can I keep my self-respect?
     Who taught you how to encourage my love for you?
     One points you out merely by rising with an aroused groin when your name is mentioned.
12 Before, I’ve cursed vigorously when your nature penetrated me.
     But recently, a love-arrow shot toward my mistress’ “eye,”
     and she quenched it in a cool well nearby. (Don’t misread my conceit: I’m talking about mss. and “I’s” and “ayes,” about quills and inkwells. My target here is always you.

     150. The Poet’s Service

     You should discourage another boy’s foolish heart from following you,
     someone whom your eyes pursue even while my eyes plead with you
     as I, your babe, run after with no hope of catching up.
  4 My surmise, not a conclusion I can affirm absolutely but one based on my experience
     as that somewhat inarticulate child who followed his heart (and thus you) as day follows day
     and let daily peace languish while adding to your bounty
     and is driven to frantic madness with perpetual unrest
  8 made terribly anxious by watching and crying;
     as that child who is now so proud to regret his service to you,
     the more I see and hear the valid reasons for despising you—
     my surmise (to try, finally, to get to the point) is that, as the crowning recognition of his service—even while he’s feeling proud
12 that you swore you’d love him and be true and constant always—
     the boy would do well, as a test, to communicate intimately with this heart
     that was set perpetually on fire with the burning passion of love.

     151. A Madman’s Thoughts and Discourse

     You who leave me coldly, who stand like a rigid plant unmoved by wind, who have failed as a muse for writers, looking like a man but acting otherwise,
     learn to cultivate feeling in your heart, and, when it grows—
     something that will happen only if you sense where your real future and your chance for immortality lie—direct it back toward me;
  4 but with me lacking both you and your pity, and with you two being inextricably linked,
     night comes on. Like fiends
     trying to gain something eternal by losing their mundane hours,
     my thoughts and my discourse are both crazy.
  8 It’s no wonder, then—though my view of things is irrational
     when my best self worships your flawed character,
     O, and though I love what others despise—
     that that best self is contented to slave away nights in your service
12 and, to try to make you see the light and to bring vision in darkness, has nearly gone blind.
     I, sick on top of everything else, have needed some balm
     even as here I grow these “leaves” to spur the growth of your pity, which would cure me.

     152. Stay, Heavenly Guest

     I, a slave to your proud heart (your art, your “hard”) and thus destined to be wretched,
     may merit your pity. To be both comforted
     and comforter—like a mother—you must kiss me and be kind.
  4 I guess that one angel who might inhabit another angel’s hell (such as this hellish domain)
     would, in effect, have flown away from the comforts of heaven,
     having given up an infinitely rich context for companionship and engrossing mental life
     and having rushed off-course from rationality, whose mouthings did not change outcomes.
  8 Even the sun itself moves blindly when the heavens are not clear.
     Directed by what attracts your eyes, by what they affirm,
     you shouldn’t dismiss my condition, the state of these mss., as hateful, whatever others do.
     To take a stand and surmount the pressing affairs of your own life, fall in beside me,
12 or else you will have made your eyes disavow the very thing they observe
     and then, “out there” in some ethereal realm, blot out: I may be melancholy company,
     a taint to companions, a pariah, but my rhetoric keeps my mss., these mysteries, under my spell.

     153. Hate Away

     So far my only measurable gain here has been my suffering.
     If you want what’s “halved” on this vellum and will stay hidden if you don’t seek it out,
     I’ll pray you get your Will
  4 but will never know whether you do or not, living in doubt
     that I hate—etymologically derived from “Hathaway.” She’s already provided fodder
     for death—as you will, too, and as men always do.
     Anticipating you, whoever you are, I’m certain of your equanimity and intelligence.
  8 O, shrewd affectionate reader, thinking about you makes my eyes well up with tears!
     But Hathaway, my dear, go on despising me, for I’ve come to know your mind, too.
     If your simplicity once made me love you,
     don’t see it as a lack of conscience now for me to equate
12 my former affirmation of your appeal with my own unreliable vision,
     for which I’ve long needed a cure. A healing solution, duplicity,
     confronted my vision, and I use it now as a means to show that all you see is genuine.

     154. The Fires of My Bad Angel

     That so-called female that makes me sin and rewards me with pain
     is one you can escape by acting in an exemplary and humane fashion,
     returning to me and calming my loud crying,
  4 until she, my bad angel, stokes up the fires and drives you away;
     once my life is saved (death having told me I’m to live, I having admitted I’ve lost you and that between us there’ll be no more “dying”)
     and the threat of death is past, there will be no more dying then.
     You who are as black as hell and who make yourself as dark as night
  8 so that a cover of darkness hides your foul faults from clear-sighted people—
     you love people with vision, and I am blind.
     My blindness means that I, more than those others, deserve love from you
     who are the object of the affections of my mss.—and she is the sole reason I get up every morning. In her service I can be lofty and elevated, but I can also descend
12 into gross duplicity, falsehood, and obscenity.
     At the place where Cupid found new fire to heat his arrow, the “eye” or “I” of my “mistress,”
     love’s fire brings on hot tears and heats the “well,” and no liquid—certainly not one that’s heated up—cools love.