A Poem Is Made of Truth

Because not all deceptions are meant to deceive.

When we are children, poems are easy. The world we move through has not yet begun to be divided into the opposites we will increasingly rely on to get our bearings. Reality and fantasy consort and commingle. Facts trip happily into fiction. Playing and pretending are part and parcel of how we explore and construct an authentic identity, and telling the truth doesn’t preclude the occasional artless bluff, or even the odd, full-blown, flagrant fabrication. Pockets full of posies, songs of sixpence, tiskets, taskets, green and yellow baskets, they all make the unconditional sense of sheer sound that has more in common with what we learn in consultation with wildflowers and whippoorwills than while consulting dictionaries.

When we grow up we put away our credulous confusions, learn that the word gullible is not actually written on the ceiling, and become impatient to know what a poem means. What was once magic becomes mere metaphor; we justify marvelous effects with reference to plausible causes; the eagerness to explain outstrips the desire to understand; the desire for clarity displaces the tolerance for contradiction.

Once upon a time we would happily set off without a destination. We planted our feet on the floor as the subway train pulled out and disdained the offers of a seat along with entreaties to hold on. The challenge of finding our footing on shifting ground thrilled us. Of course, our threshold for betrayal, like our center of gravity, was lower then; our optimism, like the skin on our knees, more resilient. Now that we have farther to fall, we prefer our journeys mapped, our surprises planned, our views curated.

In our hunt for certainty we lose the art of feeling our way through experiences to our own messy, evolving, intuitive, provisional understandings of them. Given the choice, we’d rather know what we believe than give ourselves the chance to keep discovering what we feel and think. Living comes to seem less desirable to us than knowing how to live.

It’s understandable enough. As our inner and outer worlds separate, and each becomes more and more unwieldy, we seek out our sources of stability, the touchstones and rubrics by which we can steer, though all we do is exchange the illusion that we can control these worlds supernaturally for the illusion that we can control them by other means.[1]

One of the things I love about Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 is how carefully the sonneteer feels his way through his own experience of love. It’s a process that requires exploding some deeply held certainties—about love, about truth, about lies, and about how the three fit together. But it’s a controlled explosion, one that relies on the almost essay-like structure underlying the sonnet form.

Here’s a quick reminder of how a sonnet usually works. In the first quatrain, a poet sets out the problem. In the second, she expands on it. Between the octave (the first two quatrains) and the sestet (the final six lines) is the volta, or turn. In the third quatrain the writer looks at the problem from another angle, leading to the heroic couplet which comes to a solution, dispensing with the problem.

Sonnets, like essays, are designed to persuade.[2] Essentially interior, 138 is one of those lyric poems that cultivates the illusion in the reader that she is overhearing a mind in conversation with itself. It quickly becomes apparent what the sonneteer in 138 is hoping to persuade himself is true.

Sonnet 138 by William Shakespeare 

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,
Unlearnèd 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?
Oh, 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.

Setting out the Problem: truth/lies/youth/subtleties (abab)

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,
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.

This first quatrain (which is also the first sentence) reads a little like an account of the discovery of a false premise underpinning a scientific paper that’s just gone to print. Spotting a thought that nibbles at the edges of his worldview, the sonneteer does what we all do, he reframes the anomaly. The problem is not the fact that his love is lying. The problem is what he does with the fact that she is lying. He believes her. He doesn’t pretend to believe her. He believes her.

This is the moment that has stopped him in his tracks, and where things could go a number of ways. The sonnet could proceed to be about the imbalance of power in this relationship, about how she’s got so much leverage he can no longer tell the difference between truth and lies, and doesn’t even care to try; that he’d rather blindly believe whatever she tells him than rock the boat. Or, it could be about how she’s so needy he dare not question her, not even in his own mind.

Instead, he gets to thinking. I do believe her, though I know she lies, he says to himself, scratching his head. Why? And so he retraces his mental steps: “When” this happens, this is what “I do,” “though” it reveals an inner contradiction between what “I know” and what I “believe,” a contradiction “I” tolerate as a means to an end, “so that” this happens.

It turns out he believes her because of his desire to keep up an equal, but (kind of) opposite, deception of his own: That he is himself guileless, and (therefore) youthful.

There. Sorted. Instead of having to look at the possibility that his premise—his love—is false—not just in word, but in deed (lies carries the meaning of “lies with,” i.e., other men)—the sonneteer offers himself a narrative of “the system of mutually dependent self-deception”[3] he and his love have evolved together. Neither is fooling the other; they’re only helping each other fool themselves.

The trouble is, no matter how intently he marvels at the apparatus he has uncovered whereby he ignores the contradiction that led him to it in the first place, it’s still there, in the second line, looking up at him. Luckily, he’s a sonneteer who’s embarked on a sonnet, and he now has a job to do, which is to see this new premise through.

Expanding on the Problem: young/best/tongue/suppressed (cdcd)

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.

Just as things threaten to get complicated, they suddenly become simply… simple. Where the first quatrain focussed on identifying the mechanism by which lies are believed and can constitute a truth, the second quatrain is intent on nailing down the mutual nature of that mechanism.

The argument here goes something like: It works because it’s even.

The way the sonneteer figures it, they each play their part: she, the fresh-off-the-farm girl shocked at the very implication, and he, the dumb jock who takes her word for it so she can stick to imagining the six pack under his doublet.

The poetry mirrors this give-and-take: “Although she knows” balances “though I know.” His winking faith in the declarations made by “her false-speaking tongue” corresponds with his feigned ignorance of “the world’s false subtleties.”

In the first quatrain the concession was internal, between the sonneteer and himself: “I do believe… though I know.” In the second, the financial metaphor brings the transactional nature of their implicit bargain out into the open: “I credit her false-speaking tongue.”[4]

In the crux and conclusion of the first part of the case the sonneteer’s laying out for himself, the stories we tell that are more strategic than honest (“the world’s false subtleties”) are shrugged off as “simple truth suppressed.”[5]

But just how simple is it to suppress the truth, especially an obvious one? And just how convincing are lies that we can see through?

Between the first and second quatrains, the problem doesn’t appear to have become simpler, or his argument more convincing, but things have definitely gotten a little more personal.

The sonneteer goes from being “some untutored youth / Unlearnèd”—loftier, and more flattering, than my dumb jock—to someone who’s bluntly “young.” In the first quatrain, falseness is an attribute of the world out there. In the second, it's located with intimate precision, on the sonneteer’s love’s “tongue.”

At the end of the first quatrain, the sonneteer is a kind of hero. He’s seen through something. He is so sophisticated that he understands what he gains by playing dumb. He’s got a strategy, agency, self-awareness.

Maybe it’s the backwash of seeing himself as (howsoever intentionally) credulous, maybe it’s the way “false” sits in his ear, but by the time he begins to expand on his initial observation, something’s changed. There’s an admission of vulnerability in his use of “vainly”—it’s in his recognition of the futility of his vanity. He admits that she knows his days are already past their best-by date. There’s a strain in the simplicity of the rhetoric that insists: “Thus… simply… thus… simple.”

Expanding on the Problem: young/best/tongue/suppressed (cdcd)

But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.

So here we are at the volta, where the sonneteer has the chance to rotate the question he’s addressing and let the light hit it another way.

Once again, he’s got options. He could consider the consequences of suppressing what they know (really feel)—how it affects each of them, what it does to their relationship with each other. He could produce an apt analogy off the idea of suppression. He could turn to what love was actually like when he was actually young.

What he chooses to do next is to pick up the pace and turn up the rhetoric.

The octave (first eight lines) was built of two complex, legato, quatrain-long sentences, each filling out their half of his presentation and interpretation of the facts, neither stopping for breath until it tied something down. Suddenly it’s back-to-back, one-line, staccato interrogatives. This But why…? And why…? could be the beginning of a wholesale, heartfelt, plaintive reassessment of the situation. But it's not. It’s just theater.

Elaborately tricked up in their matching double negatives[6] and high-flown, poetical inversions, these two posers are the set up for the casual, grandiose “Oh” around the corner, itself the sly lead-in for the aphoristic-sounding, archly confidential pair of affirmations rounding out the third and final quatrain. And as for them, they’re just two, howsoever elegant, ways of saying, We all know what love’s like. Their job is to smile, dispel any remaining doubts, clinch the case and deliver us into the awaiting arms of the big Therefore toward which those two wherefores propel us.

What he’s not saying (in addition to “I am old,”[7]) is that his argument for the equality of their mutual deception is itself a kind of con. Because, after all, what kind of parity is it if she really is lying (i.e., unfaithful) and he, really, is not young? How equal can it be if what he knows is that she lies (e.g., with other men), and what she knows is that his days are past the best; if her part of the bargain is simply to lie, and his, simply to believe her?

Resolving, and Dispensing with, the Problem: me/be (gg)

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

I get the feeling that Shakespeare often sees the heroic-couplet conclusion of the sonnet as a very sophisticated sort of joke. Sonnets tackle pretty big human topics (e.g., romantic and sexual love) and pretty messy human emotions (ditto). In their efforts to organize these experiences into a concise, clarifying account, sonnets often end up demonstrating just how resistant they are to organization and containment. Nevertheless, and no matter what state the package is in at the end of line twelve, it’s part of the sonnet’s mission to wrap it all up with a pair of glamorous lines of iambic pentameter so perfect they even rhyme. It’s a little like the Brian de Palma film ending on the image of Carrie White and Tommy Ross as prom queen and king, holding each other’s hands up on the stage of the high-school gym beaming beatifically out onto the crowd. Shakespeare’s poking fun at the part of all of us that wishes it had.

The sonneteer in 138 so wants to believe that his love—the person he loves and the feeling he carries—is made of truth, in spite of what he knows, that he simply does. But he also knows it’s not that simple. He can’t simply lie to himself. So he constructs an elaborate narrative to convince himself that the clash between what he knows and what he believes actually makes excellent, logical sense.

What I love about this particular narrative, this “system of mutually dependent self-deception,” is that although it’s a construction designed to make him feel better, one that is so riddled with structural weaknesses he keeps having to come up with new ways to get it to pass inspection, it’s also true.

When we’re young, love, like poetry, is easy. We can decide whether or not someone loves us by plucking the petals off a daisy. The obstacles to true love are clear and present. But age in love is not the same as youth in love, for better and for worse.

The lovers in 138 are not Carrie and Tommy. They’re not even Romeo and Juliet—also doomed, in a different way, by troublesome parents. The sonneteer and his love are closer to Antony and Cleopatra, seasoned lovers, lovers who know each others’ faults and appreciate not having their own pointed out, whose dissembling is a form of flattery[8] that is also a form of seduction.

Once upon a time, truth rhymed with youth and lies with subtleties. Now we know that true subtleties are not the opposite of false ones. That love is made of the subtle ties that defy proofs and balance sheets and dictionaries. That flattery, like deception, isn’t always insincere. That there are parts of love that even “love loves not.” That being is not always the opposite of seeming and that, more often than we might suspect, seeming is believing. That though truth and lie may indeed be the opposites we believe them to be, usually the truth lies somewhere in between.