Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Sonnet 116, misnumbered 119, in the 1609 Quarto of the Sonnets

This is probably one of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets because it seems to talk about love in a complex and offhand way and then concludes with a fairly simple point that some people can relate to, but that not many people can fulfill in a relationship. Like most of his other poems in the sequence, it is in the English sonnet form with three quatrains, a couplet, and seven rhymes.  It makes two interlocking rhetorical breaks: 12 and 2, the three quatrains answered by the couplet, and 8 and 6, the first two quatrains forming an octet that the sestet, the third quatrain joined with the couplet, expands on.

In this sonnet, the first four lines seem to say that "true" or faithful minds join together and don't try to change what is distinctive about the other person. But then things get more intense. The second quatrain uses two metaphors to stress how central and unshakable love should be: a sea mark and a star that one should navigate by. Love is then personified in relation to Time, and again emphasizes how permanent it should be, with the final couplet expressing an inarguable proposition: if I'm wrong, and proved wrong, I never wrote and nobody loved. However, since clearly he wrote and people have loved, then he can't be wrong.

It would be interesting to see how much this extreme position applies to the Sonnets and the plays generally.  Much of the poem tries to tell us what love is NOT.  What it is NOT is transitory, subject to "impediments" or "alteration," or alterable in any way. The language is extreme: "beares it out euen to the edge of doome," or Judgment Day; "neuer shaken" or challenged.  But love changes all the time, doesn't it?