Sonnet 116 - Write a critical appreciation of this Shakespearian sonnet, in which you comment on the poet's use of the sonnet form, his language use, the meaning that is produced and the value you attach to the poem.

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i)Write a critical appreciation of this Shakespearian sonnet, in which you comment on the poet’s use of the sonnet form, his language use, the meaning that is produced and the value you attach to the poem.    

Sonnet 116 is about love in its most ideal form. It praises the glories of lovers who have come to each other freely, and enter into a relationship based on honesty and understanding.  It clearly identifies the nature of love, or the whole concept of love according to Shakespeare.

As most of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sonnet 116 is divided into three quatrains and adding to that, a rhyming couplet. Each rhyme is only heard once, which enlarges the range of rhyme sounds and words the poet can use, and also allows Shakespeare to combine the sonnet lines in a more complex way. The last couplet of the sonnet summarizes and characterizes the three quatrains altogether.

The poet very brilliantly categorizes the different aspects of love by using this particular structure. In the first four lines the poem tells what love is not, and then goes onto what love truly means in the second quatrain. In the last quatrain the poet talks about the affects of Love connected to Time. This makes it easy for the reader to purely understand, and to easily follow, what Shakespeare is trying to make out of love. The last rhyming couplet of the sonnet, is used to prove his argument that he has explained throughout the poem.

The first quatrain denies the short sighted or everyday image of love, which most people tend to have. It is almost like a command the poet is making, as he says that there has to be truth (trust, honesty, purity, etc.) in marriage in order for it to succeed. He does not ‘admit impediments’, which means he doesn’t believe in any such barriers to the union between true minds - minds meaning the lovers. The poet uses to word ‘minds’, but love between two people is felt from the heart. Therefore, he might be suggesting that not only with the heart, but also by using the mind does love truly “succeed”. Interestingly enough, he doesn’t use the words “two minds”, but “true”, as that is the basis for true love, but automatically the reader is forced to think about two people.

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In the third and fourth line, Shakespeare explains what love isn’t. According to him, Love isn’t love, if it changes when the circumstances around it change: ‘which alters when it alteration finds’. Change is a very common thing, and consequently, the poet suggests that, obviously, change will come one way or the other, and if it truly is the Love that he refers to, it will never change – otherwise it was probably never Love in the first place. By suggesting that it doesn’t ‘bend with the remover to remove’, the poet is explaining the reader that it will never ...

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