The lust and degeneration of man exposed in Shakespeare's 129th sonnet Love in its purest form is the most unsurpassable of all emotions, which requires intense commitment and at the same time provides incomparable bliss. However, often the intense desire for these feelings produces a new emotion, lust, with a desire that prioritizes obtaining an objectified person, over a very real human being. Lust can be further practically defined as the inability to place selfless love on a higher pedestal than selfish desire. Shakespeare explores these conflicting definitions of lust in his 129th sonnet, condemning his animalistic variations of lust that coexist with his desire for a genuine 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 trend in this sonnet is the speaker's analysis of the mental methods through which he admired a woman. He tries to subtly define lust so as to rationalize his actions to be correct. However, he gradually becomes aware that the lust he has felt is sacrilegious and must stop. Sonnet 129 opens when the speaker is in great anguish due to the superficiality that has permeated his love. He feels as if he has exhausted his physical, mental and moral strength in the pursuit of mutual love. A "contempt of the spirit in a waste of shame" is the sign of an unfortunate desire that has missed its point of satisfaction, lost in a deep cave of inescapable nature. When human beings fall into such deep despair, it is only natural to fall back into the animalistic undertones that creep into the middle of the paper......9). Works Cited Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in Sonnets. Berkeley, University of California P, 1988. Leisham, Stephen. The enigma of Shakespeare's sonnets. New York: Basic Books, 1982. Landry, Scott. and. 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 Mistress-Mistress; A study of Shakespeare's sonnets. London: Chatto and Windus, 1968. Works Consulted Fiedler, Leslie A. "Some Contexts of Shakespeare's Sonnets." The enigma of Shakespeare's sonnets. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.