LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE -W. Shakespeare - SONNET 116

The sonnet is organised into fourteen lines divided into three quatrains and a final couplet. The three quatrains have the function to explain what ‘love’ means to the poet. He makes statements of his idea of love, writing that it lasts, whatever will happen. Moreover, the quatrains emphasise the concept of love: it is eternal and it faces everything.

In the couplet the poet refers to his personal situation, he wants the reader to recognise that he said the truth. He wrote an hypothetical sentence, but he is sure of what he means. People know love is so strong and unchangeable like he describes, he isn’t wrong.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments, love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

In the first quatrain Shakespeare writes that ‘love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’, referring to the unchangeability of love. In fact, this strong feeling doesn’t change as soon as it encounters an obstacle: it lasts and doesn’t die when one of the lover doesn’t feel the same. Love is defined as eternal, lasting and very strong.

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's unknown, although his height be taken.

In the second quatrain love is defined as a ‘ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken’, it is described as a big light that controls storms (maybe allegorically arguments, problems) and never breaks (strength of love). The poet believes that it is a star: it guides lovers through the right way.

In quatrain three there are many compounds of nouns:

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come,

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

They aim at underlining the strength of love. The poet creates a ‘chain’ of nouns to focus on his power. In addiction, in the quatrain the rhetorical level is the most important, because Shakespeare write the same concept once more, but in mannered terms.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

In the couplet the words ‘ever’ and ‘never’ are linked to the eternity of love: never refers to the writer, while ever refers to other common lovers. Love is a topic that concerns everyone. Moreover, the first word clash with the second one: it conveys an end, on the other hand ‘ever’ communicates continuity.

Finally, the rhyme scheme in the first quatrain is different from other Shakespearian schemes: ABAC, instead of ABAB. Why? Maybe because he wanted to produce a different sound (lines two and three), but writing two words with the same final letters.