Sonnet No. 116, (William Shakespeare)

Sonnet No. 116

William Shakespeare

Q. How did Shakespeare define love in his sonnet 116?

Answer: Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 116 tries to define love as what it is and what it is not.

In the first quatrain, the speaker says that love - "the marriage of the true mind" - is perfect and unchangeable; it does not accept obstacles, and it does not change when it finds a change in a loved one.

In the second quatrain, the speaker speaks of love through a metaphor: a guiding star for a lost ship ("Wandering Barks") that is not subtle to storms. It “looks at the tempest and never shaken”.

In the third quatrain, the speaker echoes what love is not: it is not sensitive to time. Although beauty fades over time as rosy lips and cheeks fall into the "his bending sickle’s compass," love does not change with hours and weeks: instead it carries to the brink of adversity.

In the couplet, the speaker tries to reassure that love is what he says it is: if his statements can be proven wrong, he declares, he must not write a word and no man can ever be in love.

However, Sonnet 116 is one of the most famous poems in the whole series, including Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer day?") and Sonnet 130 ("My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun"). The definition of love that it often quotes in poetic canon provides in compilations. Basically this sonnet represents the ultimate ideal of romantic love: it never changes, it never fades, it transcends death and admits no flaws. What's more, it emphasizes that this ideal is the only love that can be called "true" - if love is mortal, changeable or temporary, the speaker writes, and then no man has ever loved.

Overall, we can safely deduce that the basic division of the logic of this poem into different parts of the sonnet form is very simple: the first quatrain says what love is not (changeable), the second quatrain says what it is (a fixed guiding star intact by snow), the third quatrain says more precisely what it is not (“time’s fool" – that is the subject to change over time), and the couplet declares the speaker's certainty. What gives this poem its rhetorical and emotional power is not its complexity; rather, it is the power of a linguistic emotional persuasion.

The language of Sonnet 116 is not significant for its imagery or metaphorical range.

Indeed, its imagery, especially in the third quatrain (time welding is sickle that destroys the rosy lips and cheeks of beauty), is rather ideal in the sonnet, and its main metaphor (love as a guiding star) is seldom striking in its originality.

But the language in the sonnet is remarkable in that it frames the discussion of the emotion of love within a very restrained, extremely sharp disciplined rhetorical structure. With their skillful control of rhythm and variation of tone - the heavy balance of "love is not time’s fool" for opening the third quatrain; to begin the second quatrain with the declarative "O no!" - The speaker argues almost legally for the eternal peace of love, and the result is that the emotion seems stronger and more urgent for moderation in the speaker's stone. Thus, the poet defines what love is and how it works in a true lover.

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