William Shakespeare's sonnet 116 is the companion piece to sonnet 115, and I
really think you have to read them together. First of all, they have a lot in
common in terms of the imagery, in terms of the phrasing. So both of these sonnets
deal with the question of truth. Is Shakespeare telling the truth in his
definition of love? Sonnet 115 begins with the phrase or the sentence "Those
lines that I before have writ do lie." It's kind of saying everything
before this was a lie. And this particular sonnet (116) finishes with "If
this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved." This is
like saying, "well, everything that I wrote before is a testament to my love.
It's not really an error. It's absolute truth." And so it really seems
like these two sonnets have very different perspectives on love, even
though they use the same phrasing and reflect on the same ideas. Notice the
repetition of the word "writ." Other concepts that are repeated are the
references to change (the word "alteration" in different forms occurs in both poems),
we have references to time (time is described as a king, a tyrant who rules
over his court with absolute authority), and both sonnets refer to making vows
and whether these vows will last. So it seems like these two sonnets then have
very different kinds of themes. Sonnet 115 is all about growth -- how love
grows over time. And the poet says that love is a "babe." Love is an infant.
You have to acknowledge the fact that there's going to be change in the
relationship. Sonnet 116, by contrast, is all about constancy. It's all about how
your love for somebody should last till the edge of doom -- till the final
judgment. It should not change. It should be constant and steady and so on. Now
these are not necessarily opposed perspectives in the long run,
because you can definitely argue that if you are faithful and constant to
somebody within that relationship there can be improvement and change, and so on.
So, do these two perspectives harmonize? Well that's kind of for you to decide
here. Now Shakespeare opens the sonnet by talking about the proper definition of
love, and he refers to this as the "marriage of true minds."
The word "true" here means something like "loyal," and you could
think of a word like "betrothed," for instance, which has the word "troth"
in the middle. And that goes right back to medieval English, where troth or truth
meant loyalty to somebody else. So he's saying that the right kind of love
involves a coming together, a marriage of loyal minds, and this word "impediment"
then also refers to marriage. An impediment is an obstacle, and in the
traditional marriage ceremony in Shakespeare's time, the two people who
were getting married would have been asked: can you think of any impediment
that would prevent you from getting married to each other? So Shakespeare is
saying, "well, to this kind of marriage of true minds
I will not state, I will not allow for, acknowledge any obstacles." But one of the
problems with this is -- is he referring to his own marriage of true minds with his
beloved or, as some critics have thought, is he perhaps actually being sarcastic
and he's saying there's a third party here ... his beloved is not being
faithful, is going off with somebody else, and Shakespeare's being really sarcastic.
He's saying, "You guys go off, let me not get in the way. Let me not
acknowledge any obstacles to your marriage of true minds. You can
hear the sarcasm in that. That's one of the fundamental
questions with this poem. Is he complaining that his beloved is being
unfaithful, or is he actually just stating this is
a description of our relationship and everything is still good. As he goes on
he says [that] love, true love, is not love which "alters when it alteration finds." An
alteration refers to change here. If you change, if you become unfaithful, if
you go away ... then if I do the same thing that's not true love. If I alter, if
I change when I see you changing, that's not necessarily a good thing.
Think of think of somebody, for instance, becoming sick. If you're going out with
somebody, or you're married to somebody, and somebody becomes sick (maybe they're
even on their deathbed) and if you say "that is a change in you [and] now I'm
going to change and leave you" we would say that's kind of callous. The same
thing is referred to in the fourth line: "Bends with the remover to remove."
The remover is the person who removes his or her love, and then if the other
party responds by bending, by changing and not being constant, and in return
removing his or her love as well, then Shakespeare's saying that's not love.
That's not true love. It has been pointed out that there is a poetic
device being used here, and the name for this is polyptoton, which
is where you take the root of a word ... and then you kind of
change it in the sentence. So we have "alter," which becomes both "alters" and
"alteration." This allows you to be very wordy of course in prose, if you
keep altering the root of the word. So it's a rhetorical device [that] makes it
makes it seem greater, but there is a kind of irony to this, because he's
talking about love not changing. Love stays the same, and yet the words
themselves here are changing somewhat.
They are changing in form. In the second quadrant here, Shakespeare goes on
to say, "O no, it (that is love) is an ever-fixed
mark," and the word "mark" here will soon become a star in the sky, but you
can also think of a landmark, like some kind of lighthouse. These ... are
... signals that allow us to
find direction on our way. Love is something like a star in the sky that
doesn't change. It's always in the same spot. "That looks on tempests (on
storms) and is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark." The
word "bark" here means "ship." ... He's saying that if there's a
ship (we'll draw a little ship here), and we have these humongous waves, then the people on
board the ship don't have to be scared, because they know where they're going
and they know because they can look at the stars in the sky. They can look
at the star. It says "it is the star to every wandering bark" and so based on the
the angle in relation to the star we can measure where we are, and we
don't have to be scared. This word "wandering" is interesting too
because it really has this idea of going off course --
meandering all over the place. There's a great line at the end of Milton's
Paradise Lost, his great ... Christian epic. At the end of that
poem Milton talks about how when Adam and Eve after the fall leave paradise, he
says they go "with wandering steps and slow." It's a great line! So we have this
idea that wandering there is then kind of "erring." It's going the
wrong way. And this may be a reference also to somebody going in the wrong way
with another partner. You are wandering away and in that case the star, love, is
supposed to bring you back. Don't wander away Shakespeare is saying
to his beloved. He describes this star then in the eighth line. He says, "Whose
worth is unknown." We don't know much about these stars. They're so far away,
and in the same way with love we don't really recognize how amazing and
wonderful love is. "Although his height be taken."
If you think about the height, the distance to the star (above the waters in
this case), we can measure that with a navigational tool. And there are different
tools that were used over the centuries such as a quadrant, a Jacob's staff ...
There are different tools like this that allow us to to measure this kind of
distance. The third quatrain introduces the idea of kingship again, just like in
sonnet 115, and time here is described as a tyrant who has a jester, a fool, so
somebody who makes the king laugh. The idea here is that love does not play
jester to time. In other words, if time is the tyrant ... We'll give time here a
crown ... and we have the present and
the future and so on ... Then love is not going to serve time. Love is not
going to be the jester in this court, "even though rosy lips and cheeks within
his (time's) bending sickle's compass come."
A sickle here is a harvesting tool. Think of it as a short handle on [something] like a
scythe (which has a longer handle) along with a blade, so a curved blade. And if
you hold it in one hand you can create a kind of arc with it. So if you go through
the field cutting the plants you can go back and
forth. Yuu can go through the field, and these arcs, this
kind of reach, this is what we call the compass.
The compass here is the range, the sweep of the sickle. So he's saying that time
is a little bit like the grim reaper coming to harvest people. In this case
"whose rosy lips and cheeks" suggest that they have youth but eventually these
young people will die. They will grow old and they will be harvested by
time. So even though that happens, love stays the same. Love will not play the
jester. "Love alters not with his ("his" here again is time) ... with his brief hours and
weeks." From the perspective of love time doesn't matter. It's brief. It passes
so quickly, but love stays the same and "bears it out even to the edge of doom."
Doom again is the final judgement. Up to the very end love
is about faithfulness. And then we get to the final rhyming couplet, and
Shakespeare concludes by saying, "If this be error, and upon me proved ... if you can
show that this is not true and you still love, "I never writ nor no man
ever loved." So by his definition of radical constancy either all his sonnets
that he has written up to now are lies (and he says no, they're not -- they're
true) or nobody ever truly loved ... nobody truly loved like me. There's this
implication in here that if you go away with somebody else then that's not
really love. That's unfaithfulness. So watch out! Alright, as we come back
to this bigger picture of how do sonnets 115 and 116 relate to each other, as I
mentioned there is a way to kind of bring them together. So we can say that
there is growth in constancy, but I don't want to take away from the fact that
reading these sonnets together is quite jarring. It's almost as if he gives us
two different perspectives on love. The one is all about growth and
change and the other one is all about staying the course.