Shakkespeare's Sonnet 116

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare
Sonnet 116 is a unique lyric that creates the ideal of love through administration of various techniques. Shakespeare’s love is a ‘marriage of true minds’, depicting love as a pure incorruptible sentiment which is unyielding to external forces and difficulties. Love is intact even if the lover turns out to be unfaithful.
Let me not to the marriage of two minds…..Admit impediments.
"The persona gives love determined, courageous, and guiding qualities through the use of metaphorical comparisons, tone, epithet, repetition and wishes to make bold statement of love in the face of Time’s decay. The rigid fourteen lines of the sonnet are filled with an abundance of poetic and literary techniques that help to convey these main ideas." ( Grimes,2007)
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth is unknown, although his height be taken
Love is high above, like pole star, the cosmic lighthouse which guides sailors in the middle of severe sea storms. The vessels may toss and roll into the violent waves but the star remains ‘an ever fixed mark’. It’s value is incalculable though altitude can be measured, thus remaining a mystery. In line 7, wandering bark means a wooden masthead of the ship which is shaken by the tempest.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
……But bears it out even to the edge of doom
Time has no withering powers over love. It is ageless, changeless and immortal even in the face of doom’s day. Though it may take away the transient physical beauty but true love cannot be harmed by the arc of time’s sickle. Shakespeare raises love to the heights of divinity which probably no other poet has ever done. He concludes the sonnet with declaration that he would disown his poetry if proved wrong. Anyone who does so has actually not loved.
If this be error and upon me proved;
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Poets repetition of certain words- ‘love is not love’, ‘alters when alteration finds’ and ‘remover to remove’ makes the ideas more emphatic; in synergy with eternal nature of love. The theme of the poem is ‘the real love is steady in all adversities and even unaffected by time". In sonnet116, two possible symbols are Star and Time. Star here is North Star, the symbol of guidance, the spatial lighthouse to everyone .Time is a traditional symbol of decay and aging. Rhyme scheme of the poem is abab cdcd efef in the three quatrains and gg in the concluding couplet. "English sonnets are said to be made of three quatrains and a couplet. The lines 1-4, 5-8 and 9-12 group together and the last two lines group together.
The poet has employed one hundred and ten of the simplest words in the language and the two simplest rhyme schemes to produce a poem which has about it no strangeness whatever except the strangeness of perfection.(Brook, 234)