Sonnet 116

The poem progresses as an argument, responding to the universal question of love: how is it possible that love does not change when everything in nature changes? When all is subject to decay and destruction, how can love be said to exist forever? The proposition that love is unchanging and not conditioned by superficial appearance or varying circumstances is developed by viewing how love can survive under various pressures.

There is a tone of logical argument, with the introductory quatrain functioning as a rational deduction of love, stripped down to its barest essence. The poet speaks impersonally, even abstractly, about love. The language begins in an intricate and philosophical mood. The alliteration of the first line in the words “marriage” (Line 1) and “minds” (Line 1) establishes the importance of love as a deep connection. Shakespeare is attempting to avoid the artifices of his fellow love poets. This is a highly unusual portrait of love for its time, starting as a silhouette of love rather than an outpouring of affection for the poet’s muse.

There is a heavy repetition of negatives throughout: “not” appears twice in the first two lines; “no” on the fifth line; “not” on the ninth line; “not” on the eleventh line; and in the final line, “never,” “nor,” and “no” all appear. This emphasizes the basis for the definition of love that Shakespeare is expounding upon, contextualizing his stance on the eternal question of what love is. The use of negatives emphasizes that he is taking a contrary position, arguing against commonplace beliefs about love’s fickleness. There is an insistent tone. Beneath an undercurrent of formality and restraint owing to the restrictions of the sonnet form, there is a sense of desperation that must be kept at bay, a refusal to admit what many believe: that love cannot last indefinitely.

The second quatrain marks a shift into the next section of the poem. The poet turns away from logical propositions toward the language of poetry: metaphor. The image of a ship lost at sea guided by a star demonstrates true love’s constancy through a comparison to the fixity of the heavens. The comparison is apt because a star provides navigation to lost ships, just as unconditional love can serve as a refuge from life’s adversities. Love is like the unmoving North Star around which all the other stars revolve. The image of the star and the comparison to love imply that everything in the universe revolves around love. Love is the guiding light for all of life. For those who are guided by its light, love is just as eternal as the night sky’s stars, it's worth infinite.

The third quatrain begins with “Love’s not” (Line 9), establishing an emphatic tone through the use of a negation. This is the volta or the moment where the poet’s train of thought turns in a new and unexpected direction. The turn is discovered in the notion of love’s immortality. Love and time are personified here as enemies, but love is wiser than time. The sickle as a compass is a threatening ominous image of death that draws on the visual similarity between a farmer’s sickle and the Grim Reaper’s scythe. However, while lovers might perish at the hands of the grim reaper, love itself never does. The concept of alteration from the first quatrain, “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (Lines 2-3), returns again with “Love alters not” (Line 11). However, this time, the alteration refers not to mercurial human emotions, but to the inevitability of change inherent in the passage of time. Decay and loss emerge as the ultimate enemies of love, for they signal the inevitable transformation of the lover and the object of affection: no one can escape time’s influence. The repetition and subtle gestures to the rhetorical mode of the poem continually increase the tension within the poem. As the sonnet progresses, Shakespeare is stretching the bounds of the human imagination in his attempt to capture true love and encompass it poetically. However, despite this, Shakespeare reasserts that true love is not evanescent; instead, love is an alternative to death; it offers the hope that time does not destroy everything.

The tone of rational argumentation perfectly reflects the state of love as simultaneously fragile and infinitely powerful. The defiant note at the end of the sonnet is an affirmation of love’s enduring character. This rhetorical flourish deepens the poem’s meaning as the poet enters the poem, speaks confrontationally through the poem, daring anyone to disprove the definition of love they have offered. Against many depictions of romantic love as a destabilizing and painful experience, for the speaker, love’s stability is its defining feature. The inclusion of “I never writ” (Line 14) intertwines the act of artistic creation with love in its highest form, suggesting that for Shakespeare, his poetry is also an expression of love for the object of his affections.

The sense of reticence in the final couplet is a necessary step back from the grandeur of the last quatrain. The final couplet returns to the intimate world of the poet, who is willing to bet their livelihood on the truth of this statement. This removes any sense of insincerity or hyperbole that a reader might attribute to the poem’s all-inspiring view of love: the poet is placing their own faith in the reality of this idealized love.