Sonnet 116

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Sonnet 116

• Learning Objective
• To understand the language imagery of Sonnet
  116.

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Summary

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

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Quatrain 1

• In the first quatrain, the speaker says that
  lovethe marriage of true mindsis perfect and
  unchanging it does not admit impediments, and
  it does not change when it find changes in the
  loved one.

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Quatrain 2

• The speaker tells what love is through a
  metaphor a guiding star to lost ships
  (wandring barks) that is not susceptible to
  storms (it looks on tempests and is never
  shaken).

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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 sickles compass, love does not change
  with hours and weeks instead, it bears it out
  evn to the edge of doom.

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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.

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Symbols

• Marriage
• Navigation love as a guiding star.
• Time / age / death

Find a quote to go with each of these symbols!
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Death Time

• The macabre image of the Grim Reaper was quite
  familiar to Shakespeares 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.

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Now summarise the poem in 8 images and quotations