Sonnet 138 (When My Love Swears That She Is Made of Truth) by William Shakespeare
Quick answer: Sonnet 138 by Shakespeare analysed: mutual lies and the pun on lie, why two lovers choose flattery over truth, and what poets can learn from its wit.
Sonnet 138 is the wisest comedy in the sequence: a poem about two people who lie to each other, know they are being lied to, and have decided the arrangement suits them both. She swears she is faithful; he believes her, 'though I know she lies'. He lets her think he is young and gullible; she lets him think she believes his belief. The accounting is complicated and both parties are content with the books.
First printed in a slightly different version in 1599, before the 1609 Quarto, this was one of the sonnets Shakespeare's contemporaries actually got to read, and its worldliness still startles. No poem better captures the negotiated truths of a long, imperfect love.
What the poem says
The octave lays out the double deception. When his love swears she is made of truth, he believes her although he knows she lies, so that she will take him for some untutored youth, ignorant of the world's false subtleties. Thus he vainly lets her think he is young, though she knows his best days are past, and he credits her 'false-speaking tongue': on both sides, simple truth is suppressed.
The third quatrain asks the obvious questions and answers them. Why does she not admit she is unjust? Why does he not admit he is old? Because love's best habit, its best clothing, is in seeming trust, and lovers who are ageing do not love to have their years counted. The couplet lands on the pun the whole poem has been saving: therefore I lie with her, and she with me, and in our faults by lies we flattered be.
How it works
The pun on 'lie', to deceive and to share a bed, is the structural key, not a decoration. The two meanings are the poem's two subjects, and the couplet fuses them into a single verb: their deceptions and their intimacy are the same act. Wordplay this load-bearing is rare even in Shakespeare.
The tone is the other masterclass. The poem is neither bitter nor sentimental; it is amused, and the amusement is earned by symmetry. Every deception he catalogues in her is matched by one he admits in himself, vanity for vanity, silence for silence. The rhetorical questions in the sestet, and their brisk, proverbial answers, give the poem the rhythm of a man genuinely working the problem out and deciding, on balance, to keep the arrangement.
Why it lasts
Sonnet 138 endures because it describes how actual long relationships work more honestly than almost any poem before modern times: the small mutual fictions, the vanity managed on both sides, the tacit contract never spoken aloud. Where 116 defines ideal love and 129 anatomises destructive desire, 138 documents the liveable middle, love as a sustainable exchange of flattering untruths. Readers tend to laugh at the couplet and then go quiet, because the joke is also a mirror. That double response has kept it circulating for four centuries.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the load-bearing pun. Find a word whose two meanings are both true of your subject and build toward it, saving the full collision for the final lines; the reader's pleasure at the click is the poem's payoff. Steal the symmetry of confession: every fault you catalogue in another, match with one of your own, and your speaker earns the right to be witty about both. And steal the unsentimental verdict. A poem that ends by accepting an imperfect arrangement, clear-eyed and unbitter, often says more about love than any vow, and its honesty registers with readers and contest judges alike.
What poets can take from this
- Build the whole poem toward one pun whose meanings collide in the last line.
- Match every fault you expose in another with one you admit in yourself.
- Use rhetorical questions and brisk answers to dramatise thinking aloud.
- Aim for amusement rather than bitterness when writing mutual deception.
- Let your couplet accept the arrangement; clear-eyed is stronger than resolved.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about a small mutual fiction that keeps a relationship running, in which the speaker confesses their half of the lie with the same wit they use to expose the other's.
Questions
What is the meaning of Sonnet 138?
Two lovers knowingly accept each other's lies: she pretends fidelity, he pretends youth, and each pretends to believe the other. The poem concludes that these flattering deceptions are the workable fabric of their love.
What is the pun in Sonnet 138?
The word 'lie' means both to deceive and to sleep with someone. The couplet, 'Therefore I lie with her, and she with me', fuses the lovers' deceptions and their intimacy into a single word.
When was Sonnet 138 first published?
An early version appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, a decade before the 1609 Quarto, making it one of the few sonnets in print during Shakespeare's active career.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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