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sonnet 116 Shakespeare
sonnet 116 shakespeare poetry essay practice
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Sonnet 116Isabel Morgan
‘Examine the view that in Sonnet 116, Shakespeare presents love as impossible to define or
categorise.’
In Sonnet 116 Shakespeare speaks about love through his ideologies of physical and spiritual love.
Shakespeare describes the true meaning of love and how it is the highest level of human activity as
well as it being the strongest emotion. This poem is not only a declaration of love but also a
demonstration and explanation of love. The purpose of this sonnet was to define love and show that
true love exists outside of beauty.
The Sonnet opens with a line of proclamation, which explains how it is not the narrators intention to
prevent the ‘marriage of two minds’. This proclamation is a subtle rejection of illegality of
homosexuality, as the narrator speaks of soul mates ‘true minds’, from the very beginning which sets
the scene for the narrator to not only explore love but define it. The narrator often makes
suggestions of marriage to destroy the stereotype of same sex marriage within this era, not only by
explaining their intentions in the first line by mentioning the ‘marriage of true minds’, but by using
church imagery that directly correlates to marriage such as ‘impediments’ and ‘alter’. The lack of
impediments to love in this Sonnet is indicated by the flow between lines allowed by the
enjambment. The enjambment allows a pause which emphasises to the reader that they should not
‘admit impediments’ until they read further for the definitions of love.
The narrator defines love as unchanging and unwavering, as true love can out-stand circumstance.
‘Alters when alteration finds’, suggests how not even outside influences can change the feelings of
love, which is not the only influences unable to affect it, as the narrator states that it does not ‘bends
with the remover to remove’. This shows how beauty can not change love, as love is not affected by
time, love is eternal. The use of this section being the only end stopped line in the first section,
emphasises the intensity of the narrators ideologies of love, as well as separating it from the intense
metaphors and imagery in the next lines.
Love is described as ‘an ever-fixed mark’, which supports how love is unchanging. ‘An ever-fixed
mark’ could not only be imagery of a scar or imperfection, but imagery of a lighthouse. By using a
lighthouse as a metaphor for love, it gives the image of a tower that guides ships to safety through
storms and never moves, by love being defined as a lighthouse it opens up the mind to spiritual love
as it is a beacon of guidance and safety.
Throughout the Sonnet, Shakespeare is clearly defining and categorising love as an unbeatable force
that can not be changed nor moved by any influence, including the influence of even himself.
Shakespeare compares love to a ‘star’ which guides ‘every wand’ring bark’, this further influences
the definition that love is a strong emotion that guides you to another person, and everyone
experiences love in their lifetime, just like how a lighthouse and the stars guide lost ships. These
metaphors of a lighthouse and a star convey contradictory things about love, as it is man made and
not, its price can and can not be fixed. These paradoxes create a complicating factor that emphasise
how love is beyond human comprehension.
Shakespeare uses visual imagery throughout the Sonnet in order to truly capture the definition and
categorisation of love. Shakespeare expresses that ‘Love’s not Time’s fool’, this shows how love
doesn’t age with time but time does change beauty. By capitalising ‘Love’ and ‘Time’ in this section it
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