18 pages • 36 minutes read
William ShakespeareSonnet 138: When my love swears that she is made of truth
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1599A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Time
The motif of time develops the theme of Age and Experience. Shakespeare’s sonnet reflects the societal convention that the most valuable days are the days of youth and innocence. Time in the sonnet is expressed in terms of days and years. The beloved is aware that the speaker’s “days are past the best” (Line 6). According to the speaker’s own characterization in this line, the supposed best time of one’s life is when one is young, and he is well aware that he is past that stage of his life. The temporal (time-based) term “days” can be specifically connected to age through birthdays and the passing of the years. These indicate the “simple truth” (Line 8), or the simple fact, of the speaker’s age. At the end of the last quatrain, the speaker says, “age in love loves not to have years told” (Line 12). Here, age is clearly represented by years in that the speaker wants to hide how many years old he is.
Love
The motif of love develops the theme of The Nature of Love. Love first appears in the poem as a noun that refers to a specific person, the unnamed “her” (Line 2) of the poem. In Line 1, the speaker says, “[M]y love”—the possessive pronoun clarifies that he is talking about his beloved, not the general concept of love at this point. However, in this sonnet, the unnamed woman is defined through her love of the speaker. She is his love, or beloved, because her love language includes flattery, and the speaker enjoys her lies about his age.
The next appearance of the word love can refer to both the beloved and the concept of love. The speaker says, “Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust” (Line 11). The use of “Oh” rather than “my” before “love” opens the word up to multiple meanings. The line can include the beloved’s best habit (flattery), as well as the best practices in love generally. This use of multiple meanings for “love” reflects how the poem also uses multiple meanings of the word “lie.”
The following line, “age in love loves not to have years told” (Line 12) gives age the agency to love something. Here, love finally appears as a verb, but it is a concept, not a person, that is engaging in the action of the verb. The repetition of “love loves” in Line 12 also points to the multiple meanings of words. Furthermore, age has the capacity to be “in love,” or exist in an emotional state. Love appearing in a prepositional phrase, as a verb, and as a noun that refers to both a person and a concept reinforces the poem’s fixation on puns, or how words can have multiple meanings. It may also reinforce the changeable nature of love itself, from its best days in youth to its later incarnations that require comforting white lies about one’s “faults” (Line 14).
Related Titles
By William Shakespeare
