The Lust and Degeneracy of Man Exposed in Shakespeare's 129th SonnetLove in its purest form is the most unsurpassable of all emotions, requiring intense engagement, while simultaneously providing incomparable happiness. However, the intense desire for these feelings often produces a new emotion, lust, with a longing that prioritizes obtaining an objectified person, as opposed to a very real human being. Lust can be defined more concretely as the inability to place selfless love on a higher pedestal than selfish desire. Shakespeare explores these contradictory definitions of lust in his 129th sonnet, condemning his animal variations of lust that coexist with his desire for a true state of love. Instead of following the traditional convention of idealizing a woman and her attributes, Shakespeare breaks the concordance and focuses on the dehumanizing effect of the woman's attributes on her character. The general thrust of this sonnet is the speaker's analysis of the mental methods by which he admired a woman. He attempts to artfully define desire in order to rationalize his actions to be correct. However, he gradually realizes that the desire he felt is sacrilegious and must stop. Sonnet 129 opens with the speaker in great distress due to the superficial quality that has permeated his love. He feels like he has exhausted his physical, mental and moral strength in his quest for mutual love. An “expense of spirit in a waste of shame” is the mark of an unhappy desire that has missed its point of satisfaction, lost in a deep cavern of inescapable nature. When humans fall into such despair, it is only natural to fall back into the animalistic nuances that creep into the middle of paper......9). Works Cited Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare's perjured eye: The invention of poetic subjectivity in the sonnets. Berkeley, University of California P, 1988. Leisham, Stephen. The enigma of Shakespeare's sonnets. New York: Basic Books, 1982. Landry, Scott. ed. A Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Martin, Philip. Shakespeare's Sonnets: Self, Love and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972. Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1999. Winny, James. The Master-Mistress; A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets. London: Chatto and Windus, 1968. Works consultedFiedler, Leslie A. “Some Contexts of Shakespeare's Sonnets.” The enigma of Shakespeare's sonnets. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.