Th’ expense of Spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoy’d no sooner but despisèd straight; Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad: Mad in pursuit and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell II (No. 129) Th’ expence of Spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action, and till action, lust Is periurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame, Sauage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust. Injoyd no sooner but dispised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt, On purpose layd to make the taker mad. Made In pursut and in possession so, Had, hauing, and in quest, to have extreame, A blisse in proofe and proud and very wo, Before a joy proposd behind a dreame, All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well, To shun the heauen that leads men to this hell. Let our method first be, before trying to match our own intelligence with Shakespeare’s intelligence, to compare these two versions, the original one and the modern one, in order to feel as intimate with the language in which the poem was written as if all these years did not stand between ourselves and Shakespeare. First, then, as to the spelling. As a matter of course the _u_ in _proud_ and _heauen_ changes to _v_; the Elizabethans had no typographical _v_. There are other words in which the change of spelling does not seem to matter. _Expence_, _cruell_, _bayt_, _layd_, _pursut_, _blisse_, _proofe_, _wo_--any of these words taken by themselves are not necessarily affected by modernization; but undoubtedly much of the original atmosphere of the poem is lost by changing them in the gross. Sheer facility in reading a poem is no gain when we are trying to discover what the poem was like for the poet. And when one considers all that has happened to the language since Shakespeare’s time one can understand why Mr. Cummings should set his poems down so that when read they are read as ‘in the original’. But other changes to make this sonnet comprehensible to modern readers have involved more than changes in spelling. _Periurd_ to _perjured_ would have meant, to Shakespeare, the addition of another syllable, as _murdrous_ to _murderous_. _Injoyd_, with the same number of syllables as _periurd_, is however made _Enjoy’d_; while _swollowed_, which must have been meant as a three-syllabled word (Shakespeare used _ed_ as a separate syllable very strictly