Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS

By: William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 116) by William Shakespeare is about love in its most ideal form. It is praising the glories of lovers who have come to each other freely, and enter into a relationship based on trust and understanding. "Let me not" the poem begins in the imperative mood. Its action is semantic and aims to delineate the allowable parameters of love and its goal appears to be air-tightness. The love I have in mind could be like a seamark or navigational guide to sailors, it is a north star. Like that star, it exceeds all narrow comprehension. Its height alone is sufficient to guide us. The poem's ideal is unwavering faith, and it purports to perform its own ideal. Odd then, isn't it, how much of the argument proceeds by means of negation: "let me not," "love is not," "O no," and so forth. Perhaps the poet is less confident than he appears to be. The first four lines reveal the poet's pleasure in love that is constant and strong.

?Which alter when it alteration finds." The following lines proclaim that true love is indeed an "ever fixed mark" which will survive any crisis. In lines 7-8, the poet claims that we may be able to measure love to some degree, but this does not mean we fully understand it. Love's actual worth cannot be known it remains a mystery. The remaining lines of the third quatrain (9-12), reaffirm the perfect nature of love that is unshakeable throughout time and remains so "even to the edge of doom", or death. In the final couplet, the poet declares that, if he is mistaken about the constant, unmovable nature of perfect love, then he must take back all his writings on love, truth, and faith. Moreover, he adds that, if he has in fact judged love inappropriately, no man has ever really loved, in the ideal sense that the poet professes.

In the sonnet, the chief pause in sense is after the twelfth line. Seventy-five per cent of the words are monosyllables. Only three contain more syllables than two, none belong in any degree to the vocabulary of 'poetic' diction. There is nothing to remark about the rhyming except the happy blending of open and closed vowels, and nothing to say about the harmony except to point out how the fluttering accents in the quatrains give place in the couplet to the emphatic march of the almost unrelieved iambic feet.