Rob Watson

Robert N. Watson is Distinguished Professor of English. He received his degrees from Yale and Stanford, and was a professor at Harvard before moving to UCLA, where he has served as Chair of the Faculty of Letters and Science, Vice-Provost for Educational Innovation, and Neikirk Chair for Innovative Undergraduate Education. He has won UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the Gold Shield Faculty Prize. He has published multiple prize-winning scholarly books, editions, and articles, on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and environmentalism, and his poetry has appeared in The New Yorker and dozens of other literary journals. He has been awarded Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLS fellowships, spent a year as a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and this fall was the Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford.

Commentaries, Sonnet 129

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

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