Text Analysis

Th'Expense of Spirit

As the reader can note the sonnet bears the same title of its first line, he understands it's part of a collection. It consists of 14 lines and it's possible to identify the typical Shakespearean structure.

After reading the sonnet, the reader can note a very elaborate and audible sound level, with lots of assonance and alliterations: this could indicate the writer's strong will to reinforce the content meaning using particular stylistic choices.

In the first quatrain the writer highlights the word lust in the second line just next to the simple present of to be, is, and at the end of the line it's repeated and connoted directly by is perjured in the third line, by using the rhetorical device of the enjambment. Squandering vital energy in an ashamed and decayed way is what satisfying one's lust more. And in progress of it, lust makes one dishonest, murderous, violent, blameworthy, savage, extreme, rude and not to be trusted.

The reader has to remember the Shakespeare's sonnets from 127 to 154 are addressed to a dark skinned woman, where love is described as fever, shame, a passion the man has to rebel against.

Indeed even in the first quatrain lust is referred to a lady and it's deeply negative connoted (bloody, rude, cruel).

The second quatrain is characterized by a frequent contrast and opposition between the semantic field of1 what the man feels before have reached his lustful goal and the semantic field of his successive feelings and thoughts. The metaphor of the swallowed bait condenses the whole quatrain: who tries restlessly to get the Lust's pleasures, enjoys them in action but then he will hate them.

In the last quatrain the temporal or chronological aspect of Lust's effects on a man's feelings and thoughts is more deeply analyzed. Indeed the extreme nature of these feelings is underlined and the writer puts in front of the reader the utmost peak about the sonnet content. Lots of nouns indicate a huge connotation such as mad, bliss, woe.

The ending couplet is the conclusion which synthesizes denotatively the sonnet adopting again a contrast but also an alliteration and a chiasmus: these great two lines show the power lust has on men all over the world, so impossible to avoid as ruthlessly damned.  

The intense use of rhetorical devices by Shakespeare in his sonnet creates the effect of a mystical formula, something not completely defined which men can't control at all; this is it, the central focus in the sonnet beyond its surface: it's what we don't know in a complete way that excites our human curiosity and makes us never totally able to get away from it.