In sonnet 137, the speaker muses and bemoans the contradictory falsehood that lust engenders between his eyes and his heart. The speaker sees yet he sees not. And through his distorted vision, his heart becomes corrupted.
First Quatrain: “Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes”
Instead of addressing his lady-love directly as the speaker usually does in the “dark lady” sonnets, he is revealing how false and foul she is as he addresses “Love.” Of course, he is using “Love” euphemistically; his dramatization of what goes on between his eyes and heart indicate that he is actually addressing “lust.”
The speaker begins with a question, as he often does in these types of musings. He wants to know what “Love” does to him to make his eyes not see properly. He calls “Love” a “blind fool,” while he is making it clear that he is the “blind fool.” He cannot understand why his eyes betray him, because he “know[s] what beauty is,” yet when he encounters this particular woman, he continues be fooled by her outward beauty.
Second Quatrain: “If eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks”
The speaker then questions the logic of “eyes” being “anchor’d in the bay where all men ride,” that is, why should looks to which he has become “over-partial” cause his genitals to respond. And he especially wonders why the “falsehood” of his lying eyes is allowed to interfere with the “judgment of [his] heart.”
The speaker is exploring the old conundrum of the human beings’ proclivity for desiring the very things that are not good for them, the very things that will do them the most damage after promising pleasure and joy.
Third Quatrain: “Why should my heart think that a several plot”
The speaker continues musing through questions: he wonders why his heart can be captured by a woman who behaves as a common prostitute. He wonders why he allows a tempting face, which he knows to be “foul,” to lure him as if it were a model of “fair truth.”
He is, of course, again answering his own questions even as he asks them. The riddle of human behavior always shows that that behavior moves like a pendulum between good and evil. His eyes see only the outward beauty, while his mind knows otherwise. But his heart has been swayed by the outward beauty even as it senses that such beauty is only skin deep, and the inner person of this wretched woman is full of deceit.
The Couplet: “In things right true my heart and eyes have err’d”
The speaker concludes that his eyes and thus his heart have been bamboozled; therefore, they “have err’d.” He leaves the sonnet still distressed in his sickening situation, asserting that his eyes and heart, and therefore his mind, have been afflicted by “this false plague.”
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