SONNET 116 - PARAPHRASE
Let me not declare any reasons why two
True-minded people should not be married. Love is not love
Which changes when it finds a change in circumstances,
Or bends from its firm stand even when a lover is unfaithful:
Oh no! it is a lighthouse
That sees storms but it never shaken;
Love is the guiding north star to every lost ship,
Whose value cannot be calculated, although its altitude can be measured.
Love is not at the mercy of Time, though physical beauty
Comes within the compass of his sickle.
Love does not alter with hours and weeks,
But, rather, it endures until the last day of life.
If I am proved wrong about these thoughts on love
Then I recant all that I have written, and no man has ever [truly] loved.
COMMENTARY
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 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.
Sonnet 116
1 Let me not to the marriage of true minds
2 Admit impediments . Love is not love
3 Which alters when it alteration finds,
4 Or bends with the remover to remove.
5 Oh no! It is an ever fixed mark
6 That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
7 It is the star to every wandering bark ,
8 Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken .
9 Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
10 Within his bending sickle's compass come.
11 Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
12 But bears it out even to the edge of doom .
13 If this be error and upon me proved,
14 I never writ , nor no man ever loved .
A Paraphrase of SONNET 116
(Lines 1-2) Although legal marriages have barriers to prevent them [like close genes or being currently
married], I don't believe in any such barriers to the union between true lovers.
(2-3) Love isn't really love if it changes when we notice our beloved has changed.
(4-5) Love doesn't vary when someone tries to lure us away from our beloved.
(5-6) No way! Love is like a rock, and storms can't undermine it.
(7-8) Love is a constant guide to us as we sail through life, but we can't really see its true value even if
we can quantify love somehow.
(9-10) Love doesn't vary with time, even if the glow of youthfulness passes from our beloved's face.
(11-12) Love doesn't vary because of time; it stays constant even until death.
(13-14) If I'm wrong about love, then I never wrote anything [worthwhile since almost all my writings are
about love somehow] and nobody has been in love.
SONNET #40
by: William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
AKE all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then, if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robb'ry, gentle theif,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.