Sonnet 116

1. Sonnet 116 Learning Objective: To understand the language & imagery of Sonnet 116.

2. Summary • This sonnet attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and is not.

3. Quatrain 1 • 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.

4. Quatrain 2 • 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”).

5. Quatrain 3 • 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.”

6. The Couplet • 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.

7. Symbols • Marriage • Navigation: love as a guiding star. • Time / age / death Find a quote to go with each of these symbols!

8. The macabre image of the Grim Reaper was quite familiar to Shakespeare’s Elizabethan readers. It became an icon of European culture in the medieval period, in which death was a horrifyingly present part of everyday life (due to the devastating impact of the Black Plague for that). In this poem, Love is the one thing that can resist the power of death. Death & Time

9. Now summarise the poem in 8 images and quotations