possible of consummation but one only to be desired through the dream by which lust leads itself on, the dream behind which this proposed joy, this love, seems to lie. This is the final meaning of the line. It is inlaid with other meanings, but these should follow naturally from the complete meaning, it should not be built up from them. For example the line may also be read: “Before a joy (lust) can be proposed, there must be a dream behind, a joy lost by waking” (“So that I wake and cry to dream again”); or: “Before a joy can be proposed, it must first be renounced as a joy, it must be put behind as a dream; you know in the pursuit that possession is impossible”; or: “Before the man, in lust is a prospect of joy, yet he knows by experience that this is only a dream”; or: “Beforehand he says that he definitely proposed lust to be a joy, afterwards he says that it came as a dream”; or: “Before (in face of) a joy proposed only as a consequence of a dream, with a dream pushing him from behind”. All these and even more readings of the line are possible and legitimate, and each reading could in turn be made specially to explain why the taker is made mad or how lust is _to have extreme_ or why it is both _a bliss_ and _very wo_. The punctuated line in the revised version, cut off from what has gone before and from what follows, can only mean: ‘In prospect, lust is a joy; in retrospect, a dream.’ Though a possible contributory meaning, as the _only_ meaning it makes the theme of the poem that lust is impossible of satisfaction, whereas the theme is, as carried on by the next line, that lust as lust _is_ satisfiable but that satisfied lust is in conflict with itself. The next line, if unpunctuated except for the comma Shakespeare put at the end, is a general statement of this conflict: the man in lust is torn between lust as he well-knows it with the world and lust in his personal experience, which crazes him to hope for more than lust from lust. The force of the second _well_ is to deny the first _well_: no one really knows anything of lust except in personal experience, and only through personal experience can lust be known _well_ rather than “well-known”. But separate the second _well_ from the first, as in the revised version, and the direct opposition between _world_ and _none, well knowes_ and _knowes well_ is destroyed, as well as the whole point of the word-play between _well knowes_ and _knowes well_; for by the removal of the comma after the second _well_, this is made merely an adverb to modify _To shun_ in the following line--_well_ here means merely _successfully_ with _To shun_, not _well enough_ with _knowes_. This repunctuation also robs _All this_ of its real significance, as it refers not only to all that has gone before but to the last line as well: “All this the world well knows yet all this none knows well” (_i.e._ the character of lust), and “All this the world well knows yet none knows well”