Sonnet 116

• • “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” - I refuse to admit that there will be obstacles to real love
  • impediments -problem - allusion of word used in Christian marriage vows - why 2 people shouldn’t get married
  • synecdoche of “true minds” - represents their personality, values, beliefs etc. + true - connotations of great connection/understanding - important because people in Shakespearean times married for money instead - marriage is a legal relationship where you acknowledge that there will be obstacles but he is denying this/believes that a vow isn’t needed
• •  “Love is not love which alters when alteration finds ”
  • polyptoton - same aped but different form - creates a causational relationship/semantic relationship of change
  • negation of the polyptoton - opposite meaning - love is unchanging - looking about what love is not
• • “O no! It is an ever-fixed mark«” - metaphor - sailing reference - guide
  • “never changing” - love is constant - tone of certainty/ passion established through the poem. - ecphonesis of “oh no,” short exclamatory outburst despite - emphatic tone
• “That looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wandering bark” - personification - gives human qualities to nonhuman things - makes love seem like something powerful and strong - star = guiding light - helps us navigate through life - love guides us through life
• • “Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken” - can look at love in a scientific way but that is not the way to look at it - can’t appreciate how it’s incomprehensible
  • can’t understand the value of love
• • “Love’s not Time’s fool” - tangibility through the use of personification - it’s an obstacle but the use of negation contradicts this
• • “Though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass come” -
  • synecdoche = beauty
  • synecdoche of bending sickle = death - connotations of the Grim Reaper = harvest lives - tools farmers use to cut crops
  • love does not decline with time but beauty does

  
• • “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks but bears it out even to the edge of doom” - semantic Field of change negated - short time
  • contrast of short time of “hours”/“weeks” and “the edge of doom”
• • Structural techniques:
  • sonnet - 3 quatrains (ABAB) + 2 line rhyming couplet - coda = conclusion/final message of the poem:
  • ”if this be error and upon me prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d” - if someone can prove to me that everything I’ve said is wrong, I never wrote this poem nor nobody has been in love before - not a denial as it is a sonnet = love poem - when you write about love this is what you’re writing about - powerful negations - so confident
• • simple language - monosyllabic juxtposes with the complexity of the emotions of love ❤️ - love is so simple but it is huge/deep/abstract