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The Poet's Craftby Stewart Ferris

William Shakespeare

Sonnet 116

English sonnet. 1609. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. What follows is a reading of the pauses, the line-breaks, and the sounds that return — not a life of the poet.

Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove.O no! it is an ever-fixèd markThat looks on tempests and is never shaken;It is the star to every wand’ring bark,Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeksWithin 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.If this be error and upon me proved,I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet 116 — William Shakespeare. Public domain.

Sonnet 116 is an argument that pretends to be a definition. The first sentence does not even finish on its line. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” enjambs into “Admit impediments,” so the legal word — impediments, the obstacles a marriage service asks the congregation to declare — arrives only after the break. The caesura comes immediately after, at the full stop. Two beats into line 2, the poem has already changed jobs: from a vow about what the speaker will not do, to a definition of what love is not. If you cover line 2, line 1 is only a ceremony. The break is what lets the ceremony become a claim.

The rhyme scheme is the English sonnet’s ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and Shakespeare uses the wait inside ABAB to make “love / remove” feel like a lock rather than a chime. “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” is barely a metaphor. It is a refusal to let the word change its job, and the grammar repeats “alter” so the ear hears stubbornness before it hears cleverness. The second rhyme, “finds / remove,” is quieter. Removing and finding are not opposites until the lines make them so. That is what a delayed rhyme can do: it can force two verbs into a relationship the dictionary did not require.

“O no!” is the loudest caesura in the poem, and it opens the second quatrain by interrupting the definition before the definition can soften. Everything after it is metaphor, and the metaphors are about not moving: a sea-mark, a star. The lines are more end-stopped than the first quatrain. A star does not enjamb. “Never shaken” ends its line because the point is the stop. When you want a poem to sound immovable, stop the sentences at the line-ends. When you want it to sound as if it is still deciding, run them over. Shakespeare has just done the second, and now he does the first, on purpose.

The third quatrain lets Time into the poem and then refuses him. “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks” hangs the cheeks over the line-break so that beauty is, for a second, unfinished, and the next line puts that beauty inside a sickle’s compass. The enjambment is the vulnerability. The rhyme “cheeks / weeks” is almost domestic. Doom arrives two lines later, at the end of “come / doom,” which is not a pretty pair, and should not be. A scheme can save its roughest rhyme for the largest word. “Doom” would be weaker if it rhymed with “love.”

The couplet is a legal wager, which is why the poem began with impediments. “If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” The double negative — nor no man — is a clenched fist in the grammar. GG, after three quatrains, clicks shut. A couplet here is not a summary of the star and the sickle. It raises the cost of being wrong. If you write a sonnet, do not spend the couplet restating the pictures. Spend it on a consequence the pictures have made unavoidable. The rhyme “proved / loved” is plain. After “doom,” plainness is the authority.

The joins

  • Enjambment. Line 1 runs into a legal verb; line 9 runs into a sickle. In both cases the second line is worse news than the first line promised. That is a useful test. If the next line is only the noun everyone expected, the break is decorative.
  • Caesura. “Admit impediments.” stops the line early. “O no!” stops it almost at once. A pause near the beginning of a line can be louder than a pause in the middle, because the line has barely started and is already being corrected.
  • Rhyme. ABAB holds each definition one line away from its echo. The couplet is reserved for the bet. If your couplet could be deleted without loss, it is a bow, not a seal.

More readings are kept in the weekly archive. The craft lesson closest to this poem’s method is Rhyme.