“Sonnet 29: When, In Disgrace With Fortune And Men's Eyes” Summary
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- Summary
- Themes
- Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
- Symbols
- Poetic Devices
- Vocabulary & References
- Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
- Speaker
- Setting
- Context
- Resources
- Download PDF
- Download Teacher Edition
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1When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
2I all alone beweep my outcast state,
3And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
4And look upon myself and curse my fate,
5Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
6Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
7Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
8With what I most enjoy contented least;
9Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
10Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
11Like to the lark at break of day arising
12From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
13 For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
14 That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
The Full Text of “Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”
1When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
2I all alone beweep my outcast state,
3And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
4And look upon myself and curse my fate,
5Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
6Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
7Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
8With what I most enjoy contented least;
9Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
10Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
11Like to the lark at break of day arising
12From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
13 For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
14 That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
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“Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” Introduction
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"Sonnet 29" is a poem written by the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare. It was most likely written in the 1590s, though it was not published until 1609. Like many of Shakespeare's sonnets, "Sonnet 29" is a love poem. It is also traditionally believed to have been written for a young man. Unlike some of Shakespeare's other love poems, however, which are concerned with physical beauty and erotic desire, "Sonnet 29" is about the power of love to positively affect one's mindset, as the poem argues that love offers compensation for the injuries and setbacks one endures in life.
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“Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” Summary
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Whenever my luck turns bad and people look down on me I sit by myself and cry because I'm all alone, And I pray to God, who doesn't listen or answer my prayers, And I look at my life and curse the way it's turned out, Wishing that I was like someone with better prospects, That I was more beautiful, that I had more influential friends, Wishing that I had this man's skill and that one's range of skills, And even the things I love best don't bring me any pleasure; Yet whenever I think like this, almost hating myself, I think about you and then I feel Like a bird at the break of day that flies up From the ground, and sings songs at the pearly gates, Because thinking about your love brings so much richness to my life That I would rather have it than be king.
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“Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” Themes
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Self-Pity, Isolation, and Despair
"Sonnet 29" is, in part, a poem about isolation, envy, and despair. In the first eight lines, the speaker lists a series of anxieties and injuries, comparing himself negatively to more prosperous, successful, and beautiful people. The speaker thus suggests that his sense of self-worth depends on others: his social status and his emotional life are inextricably braided together, a combination the poem argues breeds only further isolation and discontent.
The poem begins with the speaker listing a series of misfortunes he has suffered. He describes himself as “disgrace[d]” and an “outcast,” and implies that he is hopeless, untalented, and ugly; that he lacks political influence; and that he no longer takes pleasure in the things he once enjoyed. It might seem, then, that the poem is responding to some catastrophe—say, a bankruptcy or a death in the family. But the speaker opens the poem with the word “when,” a conditional structure that frames the rest of the list of misfortunes the speaker supplies. He is not responding to a specific event but, instead, reflecting on something that happens to him often. This suggests that he often suffers from despair and anxiety; he often feels like an outcast and a hack.
Importantly, each of his complaints places the speaker in relation to other people. He compares his own beauty, wealth, and status to those around him—noting his “disgrace” in “men’s eyes,” wishing he were “featured [attractive] like him,” and envious of “this man’s art and that man’s scope.” The speaker clearly measures his own self-worth in relation to others. Given that he is so frequently despondent, the poem thus implicitly suggests that comparison is an unwise endeavor that results primarily in self-pity.
This self-pity, in turn, only serves to further separate the speaker from the rest of society; indeed, he bemoans how he “all alone” cries about his “outcast state” and resents those “with friends possessed.” Perhaps this is understandable; it’s difficult to deeply bond with people when relationships are plagued by envy and resentment. He also describes his relationship with other people in competitive terms: he does not want to share or collaborate with others, but instead wants to have more power, money, and influence than them.
The first eight lines of the poem thus pose an implicit question as to whether there are values that do not rely on hierarchy and competition to validate and assign worth. Regardless of the answer, it’s clear that defining oneself solely in relation to others does little to boost contentedness, confidence, or camaraderie.
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Love and Wealth
"Sonnet 29" is not just a poem about disappointment and despair: it’s a poem about the way that love comforts, soothes, and repairs the many injuries that one endures in life. After the poem’s bitter opening eight lines, the speaker reflects on the love he shares with his beloved (traditionally believed to be a young man). That love, he argues, offers compensation for all his insults, slights, and misfortunes. In this way, the poem contrasts love with wealth and status. Love stands outside those pursuits, and, with its intense pleasures and rewards, offers an alternate path to happiness.
When the speaker experiences the despair and self-doubt he describes in the poem’s first eight lines, he thinks about the man he loves and his mood transforms. Thinking about the young man, he experiences something close to ecstasy: he compares his mood to an exalted, almost religious music that breaks free of the “sullen earth” and rises to heaven itself. The speaker’s love for the young man radically improves his mood and his self-esteem. Love, here, not only improves the speaker’s general well-being, but also offers a kind of compensation for the misfortunes he has suffered. He may not have the wealth or political standing he covets, but his love offers him a different form of riches.
The speaker’s frequent use of economic and political terms reinforces the idea of love itself as a form of wealth. He notably describes himself as “in disgrace with fortune,” envies those “rich in hope,” and desires “that man’s scope” (that is, his power, influence, or skill). Though not directly describing money in these instances, this use of language nonetheless suggests that an economic and political preoccupation that runs throughout the poem.
Furthermore, in the poem’s closing couplet, the speaker directly describes the young man’s love as a kind of “wealth”—a wealth which is so satisfying that he wouldn’t give it up for anything, even to be king of England. The line echoes a complaint from earlier in the poem, “Wishing me like to one more rich in hope.” Though the speaker uses the word “rich” metaphorically in the earlier line, the resonance between “rich” and “wealth” suggests that he is drawing a strong contrast between the kind of wealth that love provides and money itself.
One might interpret this in several ways. On the one hand, the poem could be presenting love as something apolitical, divorced from the consequential decisions that shape the life of a state or a community. On the other, the poem might suggest that love stands as an alternative to the values that motivate people in politics and business (i.e., desire for money and power). Perhaps that alternative serves to critique the limitations of those values, suggesting another system of values altogether—which does not breed despair and anxiety.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”
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Lines 1-4
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate,
The poem opens with the word "When," and a quick survey of the poem reveals that sentence doesn't end for a long time—indeed, the only period in the poem comes at the end of line 14. The poem is an extended, single sentence, which can be divided in two: a conditional clause and a main clause. The conditional clause lists a series of circumstances and the main clause then explains what happens in those circumstances. The word "When" in the first line of the poem introduces the conditional clause, and the next four lines reveal what that "when" consists of. In other words, these four lines describe a situation: a situation of considerable despair and despondency for the speaker of the poem.
The speaker begins by declaring that he is doubly in disgrace—both fortune and other people have turned against him. The speaker uses synecdoche to bring those other people (and their judgment) into the poem. When he mentions "men's eyes" in line one, he doesn't mean (or doesn't only mean) that people are looking at him askance: the eyes stand in for the fact that people are judging him. Just as the eyes imply that there is some intelligence, some agency, making active decisions about his character and worth, so too the phrase "in disgrace with fortune" suggests that fortune itself is making judgments about him—that fortune has its own intelligence and agency, and thus has its own capacity to affect the speaker's life.
The next 3 lines of the poem register these effects on the speaker's life: he is "alone" and he is an "outcast." He weeps over his condition, and he prays to heaven for relief. But his prayers are "bootless"—that is, useless. They fail to improve his lot, and so he looks at himself and curses the circumstances that brought him to this point.
The lines are highly charged with emotion—when this speaker is not weeping, he is crying out to heaven or cursing his fate. Indeed, they may even be melodramatic. Immediately, then, the reader faces a major interpretative issue: whether to take the speaker seriously. If the reader does, the eventual resolution of the poem is a powerful testament to love's capacity to assuage the wounds of the world. If the reader doesn't, however, the poem becomes melodramatic and unconvincing.
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Lines 5-8
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least;
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Lines 9-10
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
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Lines 11-12
Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
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Lines 13-14
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
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“Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” Symbols
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Heaven
In poetry, "heaven" is often both a literal and a symbolic place. On the one hand, "heaven" is the Christian paradise, the place beyond the skies where God, the angels, and the souls of the righteous live in eternal bliss. On the other hand, poets often use the word "heavens" as a fancy word for the sky—without necessarily intending that their readers reflect seriously on Christianity.
In this case, the speaker largely uses the word in the first sense. The clue here is the word "deaf," which grants agency and intelligence to heaven. Heaven could listen to the speaker's prayers but it has either lost the ability or the inclination to pay attention to him. At work here is a further refinement of the traditional Christian symbol: the word "heaven" is not only a symbol of Christian paradise, it is also a metonym for God himself, the being who listens to and answers prayers.
If the literal sense of the word seems largely absent from line 2, it nonetheless returns in line 12, where the lark "sings hymns at heaven's gate." Here the lark is rising into the sky and singing as it does so. The second use of the word "heaven" thus blends the symbolic and the literal. The bird is literally in the sky singing, but unlike the speaker's "bootless cries," its songs do actually reach "heaven's gate." The implication, though it remains an implication, is that the speaker's prayers are heard in the second half of the poem: that his relationship with his lover changes his relationship to Christianity and indeed to the Christian God.
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The Lark
The "lark" that appears in line 11 is symbolic in two ways. Birds often appear in poems, and their beautiful, expressive songs serve as symbols for poetry itself—or for any passionate utterance, including the declarations of young lovers and prayers. Indeed, Shakespeare refers to more than 60 separate species of birds in his complete works. He particularly favors birds like nightingales, kestrels, and martins for these romantic similes. He reserves spookier birds like the owl and the loon as symbols for despair and disturbance. In Richard II, for instance, the doomed king uses bird imagery to register the shock of political revolution: "For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing" (III.3.183).
As this passage suggests, the particular bird that Shakespeare invokes here—the lark—is important. Even as birds (and bird song) frequently serve as symbols for the beauty and musicality of poetry, the specific bird matters. The lark is, for instance, a morning bird: Chaucer refers to it as "the messenger of day," and Shakespeare himself frequently invokes at as a time-keeper, a bird whose habits help human beings organize their daily tasks in the absence of widespread time-keeping devices. For example, in the songs that close Love's Labour Lost, Spring sings, "merry larks are ploughmen's clocks" (V.2.894). The lark is thus not simply a singer: the bird helps to regulate human activity.
The presence of a lark in a poem like "Sonnet 29" thus suggests an organized world, in which people behave in accordance with expected standards. To compare himself to a lark, as he does in line 11, suggests that the speaker has achieved some reconciliation with the rituals and standards of the world he protests against in the first eight lines of the poem.
The lark also sings as it flies—not while it's sitting on a branch or on the ground. This makes the lark a frequent symbol of prayer, since its song seems to rise (literally) into and through the heavens. The simile is proverbial, even clichéd. In a poem so much concerned with speech and its effects, it is striking that the speaker turns to such a commonplace, expected symbol here. It is as though, in his bliss, he is willing to accept the linguistic and symbolic resources of his culture without complaint.
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“Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
"Sonnet 29" contains one moment of particular alliterative intensity: the chain of /th/ sounds that appear in lines 9 and 10. These lines also contain moments of consonance, adding to the effect:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising Haply I think on thee, and then my state
Almost every word in the lines exhibits either alliteration or consonance, binding them together in a tight net of sonic sameness. This raises interesting questions for the interpretation of the poem. This sonic sameness appears in the poem precisely at the moment when the speaker is trying to draw a distinction between two kinds of thoughts—his obsessive, anxious worries and his pleasurable, liberating love. The alliteration and consonance in the lines belie this distinction—suggesting that the two may not be so different after all. Perhaps the pleasure the speaker derives from reflecting on his love is related to the intensity of his anxiety—or a continuation of it.
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Apostrophe
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Caesura
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Diacope
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Enjambment
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Hyperbole
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Personification
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Simile
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Synecdoche
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"Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Fortune
- Beweep
- Outcast
- State
- Bootless
- Hope
- Scope
- Contented
- Haply
- Lark
- Sullen
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In its most straightforward uses, the word refers to chance or luck. However, the word has a range of secondary senses which remain relevant here. For example, "fortune" often refers to wealth, a sense that echoes the use of the word "rich" in line 5 and "wealth" in line 13. The poem thus suggests that there's a relationship between one's chances and one's wealth—if you have more money you have better luck.
Additionally, in Roman religion, fortune was worshiped as a deity, the goddess of luck. Renaissance writers often played on this antiquated belief, invoking fortune as though they were speaking to someone or something that controlled their lives. That sense is active here: the speaker is not simply "in disgrace" nor does he simply have bad fortune. Rather, he is "in disgrace with fortune," which gives fortune a measure of power over his life—the power to give, and then withdraw, grace.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”
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Form
"Sonnet 29" is a Shakespearean sonnet. Though the form bears his name, Shakespeare didn't actually invent it—he just popularized it. A Shakespearean sonnet uses iambic pentameter, has 14 lines, and follows a standard rhyme scheme. The first 12 lines consist of three quatrains that follow an ABAB rhyme scheme. The final two lines form a rhyming couplet.
Often in Shakespeare's sonnets, these units serve to organize the content of the poem so that Shakespeare starts talking about something new every four lines. "Sonnet 29" is a little different, however. For example, as one moves from line 4 to line 5, the speaker continues to lay out his anxieties: the first eight lines are a cascade of repetitive complaints. Indeed, readers don't even get a new sentence with the change of rhyme in each quatrain: the whole poem is one long sentence. It starts, in line 1, with the dependent clause of a conditional sentence.
Shakespeare is usually very careful with the way he organizes his poems, so that when a unit of rhyme ends a grammatical unit also closes. The long sentence—and the anxious, obsessive energy it embodies—thus disrupt the formal organization of the Shakespearean sonnet, with its usual rhetorical and grammatical divisions. It suggests that the speaker of this particular poem is so anxious and upset that he has lost control of himself and his language.
The long sentence disrupts another important characteristic of the Shakespearean sonnet. Sonnets traditionally have a volta (or "turn), a place where the argument of the poem changes or where the speaker introduces a new perspective or idea. In Shakespeare's sonnets, the volta usually comes at line 13. In earlier sonnet structures, like the Petrarchan sonnet, the volta usually falls at the start of line 9.
Although this poem follows the usual rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet, its volta comes in line 9, where the sentence enters its main clause; lines 13 and 14 reiterate and expand what one learns in lines 9-12. Once again, the disruption to formal expectations for a Shakespearean sonnet suggests that the speaker has lost control and is experiencing real distress.
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Meter
"Sonnet 29" is written in iambic pentameter—a meter that Shakespeare uses throughout his dramatic and poetic work. Take, for example, line 2:
I all alone beweep my outcast state
Despite his immense skill with the meter, "Sonnet 29" contains a number of moments of metrical irregularity. There are trochees throughout the poem, for example. Lines 5, 6, and 10 start with trochees:
Wishing
Featured
Haply
Line 3 features stark metrical substitutions as well:
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
There is some debate whether "trouble" and "heaven" should be read as each having one syllable or two. Yet whether or not one swallows the final syllable of "trouble" or the final syllable of "heaven" as Renaissance speakers sometimes did, the line does not become fully regular. The result is a feeling of rhythmic instability, as though the speaker's anxiety was chopping his speech into taut, uneven bursts.
Lines 9 and 11 both feature feminine (or unstressed) endings that extend the line past the usual 10 syllables, but these disturbances are less severe than they initially appear. The stress in both words still falls on the tenth syllable of the line, right where one expects it. Indeed, reading the lines, one is not aware that anything is strange until reaching the eleventh syllable. The effect of these rhymes is thus like a slight syncopation, which does not ultimately upset the dominant rhythm of the poem. It is a notable moment, though, because Shakespeare so rarely uses feminine endings like these: another indication that this speaker is experiencing emotions that disturb the usual order and mastery of the Shakespearean sonnet.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Sonnet 29" follows the standard rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet, consisting of three quatrains and a concluding couplet. There is one important substitution, however. Lines 10 and 12 in the third quatrain rhyme with lines 2 and 4 in the first:
ABABCDCDEBEBGG
Typically, each quatrain would contain a set of new rhymes. This repetition—which doesn't simply rhyme, but directly repeats the word "state"—serves to remind the reader of the first part of the poem; as the speaker's mood shifts into a more positive one, the shared rhyme echoes the speaker's earlier declarations of misery in order to underscore how drastic his change in mood is—which, in turn, emphasizes the power of his love.
What's more, in most Shakespearean sonnets, the quatrains serve to mark out the internal boundaries of the sonnet's ideas: each unit of sound also functions as a unit of sense. However—perhaps as a result of the speaker's distress—this sonnet's single, repetitive sentence spills past these sonic boundaries.
Even so, the rhyme scheme is straightforward and assured. Nearly all of the rhymes in the poem are single syllable words; all of these single syllable words are also strongly stressed in their lines. Even if the lines are internally disturbed, they come to strong, confident end-points—suggesting, perhaps that the speaker's distress is not quite as serious as he says it is.
To modern ears, the rhyming of lines 6 and 8 looks like a slant rhyme. However, given the difference between Renaissance and modern English pronunciation, it's likely that Shakespeare's readers would have heard the word "least" as "lest."
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“Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” Speaker
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The speaker of "Sonnet 29" is an anonymous lover. He addresses the person he loves (traditionally believed to be a young man) directly, referring to him as "thee." His relationship with his lover seems strong, even sustaining: he turns to that relationship as a source of comfort during difficult periods. The rest of his life, outside his relationship, seems like a mess: he spends much of the poem detailing his anxieties and injuries. The speaker also appears to be obsessed with traditional markers of success—wealth and power—even as he begins to imagine, in the poem's final 6 lines, alternative forms of value.
There is a long tradition (which begins in 1780, with Edmund Malone's edition of the Sonnets) of reading these poems autobiographically—that is, as if they tell a true story about Shakespeare and his love affair with a young man who comes from a higher class. There is no evidence in this poem to support that reading. However, if one accepts it, some suggestive possibilities open up.
For instance, the speaker of the poem may find comfort in his relationship because his lover comes from a higher class: his relationship with the young man gives him access to wealthy and powerful circles he would be excluded from on his own. This reading makes the ending of the poem less sweet than it initially appears—Shakespeare's speaker becomes mercenary, leveraging his relationship into political and economic power. This reading, however, should be approached with considerable caution: it relies on a controversial theory about the relationship between Shakespeare's life and his own poems, which is a theory that the poem itself does not clearly support.
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“Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” Setting
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"Sonnet 29" is not explicit about its setting. It is most likely setting is Renaissance London, the city where Shakespeare made his career as a playwright and actor—and where he mixed with members of the aristocracy, despite coming from common roots. More broadly, the poem's setting is a stratified society where wealth and social prestige determine one's capacity to succeed in life. The speaker locates his aspirations and complaints within the context of this society, even as he protests against it—and describes himself as an "outcast," someone who lives (unhappily) beyond its boundaries.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”
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Literary Context
"Sonnet 29" was most likely written in the 1590s, during a fad for sonnets that followed the publication of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella (1590). The sonnet developed from low-brow tavern songs in medieval Italian; it was transformed into an exalted form of love poetry by the Italian poets Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch in the 13th and 14th centuries.
From there, it spread across Europe—though it did not become popular in England until the early 16th century, when Sir Thomas Wyatt began translating Petrarch's sonnets into English. But Sidney's Astrophil released an explosion of creative energy among English poets, with Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Thomas Lodge, and Barnabe Barnes all producing sonnet sequences in the decade. "Sonnet 29" was thus written at a moment when the sonnet was at the height of its popularity and prestige in English.
Of course, "Sonnet 29" wasn't actually published until 1609, long after the fad ended. The circumstances of the publication of the Sonnets are murky, but it was most likely pirated by the printer Thomas Thorpe. Shakespeare's Sonnets were perhaps his least popular text during the Renaissance. They were only reprinted once in the 17th century (in an altered order, assembled by the editor John Benson in 1640). They were not republished in their original order until 1780. The Sonnets only became canonical in the 19th century. "Sonnet 29" thus has a complicated relationship to its own literary context. It is written in response to a literary fad, but it only becomes a popular and important text 200 years after its composition.
Historical Context
"Sonnet 29" describes a highly stratified world, where money, influence, and social status determine one's opportunities. This is in many ways an accurate reflection on the highly stratified society of Elizabethan England. Unlike contemporary societies, where it is permissible—and theoretically possible—for someone born into poverty to become wealthy and influential, the Elizabethans jealously guarded class and professional distinctions. They even passed laws regulating what clothes each class could wear—and prosecuted people for wearing the wrong thing.
This intense anxiety about class—and this desire to closely police it—reflects the transitional character of the period, which was shifting from a medieval world into an emerging capitalist society. Shakespeare himself was part of this emerging capitalist class: a commoner born in the countryside, he came to London and made a fortune in the theater. At the time of his death, he had become a member of the gentry, the third highest social class.
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More “Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” Resources
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External Resources
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The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence — An article from the British Literature Wiki covering the broad dynamics of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, with special attention to Shakespeare's sequence.
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Sonnet 29 Read by Sir John Gielgud — Shakespearean actor Sir John Gielgud reads "Sonnet 29."
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When the Bard Had the Blues — Alicia Ostriker analyzes "Sonnet 29" and writes about how it has affected her approach to her own writing—and the struggles that come with writing.
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Lovers' Laments — Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky writes about the sonnet craze of the 1590s.
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The Social Structure in Elizabethan England — Liza Picard describes the class system of Elizabethan England for the British Library.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Shakespeare
Cite This Page -
1When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
2I all alone beweep my outcast state,
3And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
4And look upon myself and curse my fate,
5Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
6Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
7Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
8With what I most enjoy contented least;
9Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
10Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
11Like to the lark at break of day arising
12From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
13 For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
14 That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
CloseLines 3-4
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed
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