sonnet 116 Flashcards
essence of the poem
Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 is a parody of Petrarch, inverting conventional gender roles to create a more complex depiction of true, human love.
William Shakespeare
- part of a collection of 154 sonnets:
- first 126 are addressed to a ‘fair youth’ - rumoured to be the Earl of Southampton
- last 28 to a ‘dark lady’
why was the sonnet form popular in the Renaissance?
- The Renaissance was a time of uncommon peace with no external turmoil and so the first time introspecting and focusing on matters of the heart, accounting for the popularity of the sonnet as it is synonymous with love poetry.
- They were particularly popular in European courts as they focus on the speaker’s experience of desire and inner struggle which made them amenable to articulating courtier’s social and political experiences and frustrations.
themes
qualities of ideal love
structure
3 x quatrains, 1 x rhyming couplet
usually a volta at line 9 (in Petrarchan sonnets) but here builds momentum instead towards true love
development
ideas develop from a physical idea of love with images such as a wedding ceremony, to love transcending death
‘Let me not to the marriage of true mindes
Admit impediments, love is not love.’
- opening lines echo marriage vows - confident and declaratory in tone
- immediately evokes the idea of marriage and that there should not be obstacles to the union
- love not need be recognised by the law or church - moreso based in compatibility
- pessimistic determiners ‘not’, love is defined by what it is not
‘Which alters when it alteration findes,
Or bends with the remover to remove.’
- polyptoton = repetition of words deriving from the same root
- emphasises love and its counterfeit are hard to distinguish
‘O no, it is an ever fixed marke’
- lighthouse
- guides ships and withstands storms , so love is a guiding light / love
- ‘ever-fixed’ is at the central structure of the sonnet, that resonates the idea that love is constant and at the heart
‘It is the star to every wandring barke’
- determiner ‘the’, highest valued, nothing compares to it, referencing the North Star - star never changes it’s position within the sky
- links back to the navigation knowlegde that sailors would have used at the time of Shakespeare writing
‘Whose worths unknowne, although his higth be taken’
- to outsiders, true love’s worth cannot be measured nor determined
- addressed to a male
‘Lov’s not Times foole, though rosie lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickles compasse come.’
- volta, the image of love as a guiding star is replaced by personification of love as an eternal, everlasting force which can resist death
- capitalisation, love has been personified like the Grim Reaper
- ‘sickles’ = scythe, reinforcing dangerous quality
- alliteration alludes to a clock ticking
‘Love alters not with his breefe houres and weekes,
But beares it out even to the edge of doome’
- jump in time frame = hyperbolic
- the day of judgement
- elongated line with extra syllable, love does not relent and will endure until then - it is a force that will outlive them
over 3/4 of the words are monosyllabic
making the sonnet accessible to almost anyone, a fitting statement of loved as a universal human statement
celestial imagery
language is extraordinary, almost subliminal - a true love out of this world, beyond any other human’s comprehension
- Elizabethan belief that stars represent fate
