ABSTRACT
The greatest of all of William Shakespeare's sonnets reveals how the instability of judgment is therefore a turbulent flux of emotion. When confronted with the emotional self-conflict of the dark lady sonnets, people might have a strong desire to play with their conflicts as though they were colors in a Rubik's cube. In the sonnets to the fair man, the clear outlines of what the speaker should feel also correspond to the clarity of the speaker's vision. The senses render an emotional judgment of hate against the heart, which in turn hatefully judges the senses. Booth is right to gloss "tender feeling" as "keen sense of touch": the feeling of the heart paradoxically finds the touch to be "base" by imagining itself in the language of touch. The world of the dark lady sonnets is a world in which feelings can never resolve into clear emotions because the speaker is too ensnared in a world of moral compromise.
