Introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets

The Sonnets are Shakespeare's most popular works, and a few of them, such as Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee
to a summer's day), Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds), andSonnet 73 (That time of year
thou mayst in me behold), have become the most widely-read poems in all of English literature.
Composition Date of the Sonnets

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, likely composed over an extended period from 1592 to 1598, the year in which
Francis Meres referred to Shakespeare's "sugred sonnets":
The witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his
Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c. (Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury)
In 1609 Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare's sonnets, no doubt without the author's permission, in quarto
format, along with Shakespeare's long poem,The Passionate Pilgrim. The sonnets were dedicated to a W. H.,
whose identity remains a mystery, although William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, is frequently suggested
because Shakespeare's First Folio (1623) was also dedicated to him.

SONNET 116 PARAPHRASE

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Let me not declare any reasons why two
Admit impediments. Love is not love True-minded people should not be married. Love is not
love
Which alters when it alteration finds, Which changes when it finds a change in
circumstances,
Or bends with the remover to remove: Or bends from its firm stand even when a lover is
unfaithful:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark Oh no! it is a lighthouse
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; That sees storms but it never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark, Love is the guiding north star to every lost ship,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Whose value cannot be calculated, although its altitude
can be measured.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Love is not at the mercy of Time, though physical
beauty
Within his bending sickle's compass come: Comes within the compass of his sickle.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, Love does not alter with hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. But, rather, it endures until the last day of life.
If this be error and upon me proved, If I am proved wrong about these thoughts on love
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Then I recant all that I have written, and no man has
ever [truly] loved.

Notes

marriage...impediments (1-2): T.G. Tucker explains that the first two lines are a "manifest allusion to the
words of the Marriage Service: 'If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not
be joined together in holy matrimony'; cf.Much Ado 4.1.12. 'If either of you know any inward impediment why
you should not be conjoined.' Where minds are true - in possessing love in the real sense dwelt upon in the
following lines - there can be no 'impediments' through change of circumstances, outward appearance, or
temporary lapses in conduct." (Tucker, p. 192).

bends with the remover to remove (4): i.e., deviates ("bends") to alter its course ("remove") with the
departure of the lover.

ever-fixed mark (5): i.e., a lighthouse (mark = sea-mark).

Compare Othello (5.2.305-7):
Be not afraid, though you do see me weapon'd;
Here is my journey's end, here is my butt,
And very sea-mark of my utmost sail.
the star to every wandering bark (7): i.e., the star that guides every lost ship (guiding star = Polaris).
Shakespeare again mentions Polaris (also known as "the north star") in Much Ado About Nothing(2.1.222)
and Julius Caesar (3.1.65).

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken (8): The subject here is still the north star. The star's
true value can never truly be calculated, although its height can be measured.

Love's not Time's fool (9): i.e., love is not at the mercy of Time.

Within his bending sickle's compass come (10):i.e., physical beauty falls within the range ("compass") of
Time's curved blade. Note the comparison of Time to the Grim Reaper, the scythe-wielding personification of
death.

edge of doom (12): i.e., Doomsday. Compare 1 Henry IV (4.1.141):

Come, let us take a muster speedily:
Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily.
_____

Sonnet 116 is about love in its most ideal form. The poet praises the glories of lovers who have come to each
other freely, and enter into a relationship based on trust and understanding. The first four lines reveal the poet's
pleasure in love that is constant and strong, and will not "alter when it alteration finds." The following lines
proclaim that true love is indeed an "ever-fix'd mark" which will survive any crisis. In lines 7-8, 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. The remaining lines of the third quatrain (9-12), reaffirm
the perfect nature of love that is unshakeable throughout time and remains so "ev'n to the edge of doom", or
death.

In the final couplet, the poet declares that, 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. The details
of Sonnet 116 are best described by Tucker Brooke in his acclaimed edition of Shakespeare's poems:

[In Sonnet 116] the chief pause in sense is after the twelfth line. Seventy-five per cent of the words are
monosyllables; only three contain more syllables than two; none belong in any degree to the vocabulary of
'poetic' diction. There is nothing recondite, exotic, or metaphysical in the thought. There are three run-on lines,
one pair of double-endings. There is nothing to remark about the rhyming except the happy blending of open
and closed vowels, and of liquids, nasals, and stops; nothing to say about the harmony except to point out how
the fluttering accents in the quatrains give place in the couplet to the emphatic march of the almost unrelieved
iambic feet. In short, the poet has employed one hundred and ten of the simplest words in the language and the
two simplest rhyme-schemes to produce a poem which has about it no strangeness whatever except the
strangeness of perfection. (Brooke, p. 234)
Along with Sonnets 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing
like the sun”), Sonnet 116 is one of the most famous poems in the entire sequence. The definition of love that it
provides is among the most often quoted and anthologized in the poetic canon. Essentially, this sonnet presents
the extreme ideal of romantic love: it never changes, it never fades, it outlasts death and admits no flaw. What is
more, it insists that this ideal is the only love that can be called “true”—if love is mortal, changing, or
impermanent, the speaker writes, then no man ever loved. The basic division of this poem’s argument into the
various parts of the sonnet form is extremely simple: the first quatrain says what love is not (changeable), the
second quatrain says what it is (a fixed guiding star unshaken by tempests), the third quatrain says more
specifically what it is not (“time’s fool”—that is, subject to change in the passage of time), and the couplet
announces the speaker’s certainty. What gives this poem its rhetorical and emotional power is not its
complexity; rather, it is the force of its linguistic and emotional conviction.

The language of Sonnet 116 is not remarkable for its imagery or metaphoric range. In fact, its imagery,
particularly in the third quatrain (time wielding a sickle that ravages beauty’s rosy lips and cheeks), is rather
standard within the sonnets, and its major metaphor (love as a guiding star) is hardly startling in its originality.
But the language is extraordinary in that it frames its discussion of the passion of love within a very restrained,
very intensely disciplined rhetorical structure. With a masterful control of rhythm and variation of tone—the
heavy balance of “Love’s not time’s fool” to open the third quatrain; the declamatory “O no” to begin the
second—the speaker makes an almost legalistic argument for the eternal passion of love, and the result is that
the passion seems stronger and more urgent for the restraint in the speaker’s tone.