The heavily and obviously innuendo-laden Sonnet 151 returns to a struggle the poet purports to experience between what his soul – the 'nobler part' of his being – knows to be right and what his body wants and, with the by implication reluctant permission of the soul, then also gets: sex with his mistress.

Although coached in euphemism and metaphor, it is in fact one of the most sexually explicit sonnets in the collection and succeeds in leaving remarkably little to the imagination, once unpacked.