Sonnet 116

Summary

Sonnet 116 is Shakespeare's most famous definition of love, and it works by saying first what love is not. The speaker opens with a phrase borrowed from the church's marriage service: he will not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds. The marriage here is a union of minds and wills rather than a wedding ceremony, and the speaker refuses to grant that anything can lawfully part it. Love that changes when the beloved changes, or that withdraws when the other withdraws, is not love at all. The second quatrain turns from denial to two images of fixity. Love is a sea-mark, a beacon or tower that faces storms without being shaken, and it is the star by which every wandering ship steers. Sailors can measure the star's height with their instruments, yet its true worth lies beyond their reckoning. The image joins practical navigation to something close to wonder. The third quatrain brings in Time as a reaper whose curved sickle cuts down rosy lips and cheeks. Beauty falls within its sweep, but love is not Time's fool, not a jester at Time's mercy. It does not shift with brief hours and weeks; it endures to the edge of doom, the Last Judgment. The closing couplet stakes everything on the claim: if this is error and can be proved against him, then the speaker never wrote and no man ever loved. Since the poem itself stands as proof that he wrote, the challenge closes the argument. The poem follows the English or Shakespearean pattern of three quatrains and a couplet rhyming abab cdcd efef gg, with the feminine endings of lines 6 and 8 and a strong turn at line 9. It sits among the sonnets addressed to the young man, though nothing in it names an addressee. Little noticed in its own century, it has become one of the most quoted poems in English and is often read at weddings.

Top Lessons

• Constancy as the test of love

  Shakespeare locates love not in feeling or beauty but in what refuses to change when circumstances change. A love that alters when it finds alteration was only ever a response to conditions. The sonnet teaches that fidelity is the measure of love, especially once youth and beauty begin to fall to Time's sickle.

• The star whose worth is unknown

  The navigational image allows that love can be partly measured: its height can be taken, and it gives direction. Yet its worth lies beyond calculation. Shakespeare suggests that the most important things in life guide us without being fully understood by us.

• Love outlasting the body

  The third quatrain concedes that beauty belongs to Time: lips and cheeks come within the sickle's compass. Love, however, is not Time's fool and lasts to the edge of doom. The poem separates the beloved's perishable features from the bond itself, a distinction that gives weight to vows made for old age and sickness.

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