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Essay on Shakespeare Sonnet 116
Sonnet 116 is about love in its most ideal form. It is praising the glories of lovers who have come to each other freely, and enter into a relationship based on trust and understanding. The poet claims that we may be able to measure love to some degree, but this does not mean we fully understand it. Love's actual worth cannot be known it remains a mystery. If he is mistaken about the constant, unmovable nature of perfect love, then he must take back all his writings on love, truth, and faith. Moreover, he adds that, if he has in fact judged love inappropriately, no man has ever really loved, in the ideal sense that the poet professes.
This sonnet attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and is not. In the first quatrain, the speaker says that love ‘the marriage of true minds’ is perfect and unchanging; it does not ‘admit impediments’, and it does not change when it find changes in the loved one. In the second quatrain, the speaker tells what love is through a metaphor: a guiding star to lost ships ‘wand'ring barks’ that is not susceptible to storms it ‘looks on tempests and is never shaken’.
In the third quatrain, the speaker again describes what love is not: it is not susceptible to time. Though beauty fades in time as rosy lips and cheeks come within ‘his bending sickle's compass’, love does not change with hours and weeks: instead, it ‘bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom’. In the couplet, the speaker attests to his certainty that love is as he says: if his statements can be proved to be error, he declares, he must never have written a word, and no man can ever have been in love...............
