What View of Love Does Shakespeare Present in Sonnet 116 (Let Me Not)?

Shakespeare warns the reader that what seems ‘love’ may not be true ‘love’. This idea is laid out by the ploce in ‘love is not love’, which seems to contradict itself. Shakespeare shows that what we call ‘love’ may just be the appearance of love, ‘the rosy lips and cheeks’ – or beauty – which will surely be destroyed by ‘Time’. In antithesis to false love, Shakespeare sets up the idea of true love through a developed series of metaphors. First he uses synecdoche to link and contrast ‘true minds’ with ‘rosy lips and cheeks’: two things of very different value. Later, Shakespeare says love is a guiding ‘star’, suggesting heaven, eternity, brilliance; that it ‘looks on tempests but is never shaken’. The negative image creates a sense of fear, danger, of trial and torment, and that love is the only constant, dependable thing in it.

In fact, the poem has a negative tone throughout. ‘Time’s bending sickle’s compass’ and ‘edge of doom’ continue the grim tone with images of death first, then – as if that weren’t enough – he adds total destruction (‘doom’). Love is the only light in this rather bleak view of human life, which is symbolised by the metaphor of the ‘wandering bark’ – the lost ship. Love never alters, cannot be removed, is ‘always’ ‘ever fixed’, like God perhaps; love is the ‘star’ set at the centre of the poem.

Despite the apparently humble start (let me not), Shakespeare takes a lecturing tone where he tell us (or his lover) what love is. He doesn’t tell us what love is like, and uses no similes whatever. He tells us what love ‘is’ and what it ‘is not’, and uses a large number of absolutes ‘ever’, ‘every’, and ‘never’, which he repeats. This gives a very definite, confident, even stern tone. Shakespeare hammers his message home through anaphora where he tells us – unusually – not what love is, but what ‘love is not’. Overall, the poem seems more like a criticism of someone who has not been constant. Yet the very negative imagery and language, somehow makes Shakespeare’s vision of true love shine even more brilliant.

Shakespeare’s bravado at the end of the poem where he scoffs at the idea that his poem could possibly be ‘error’ or that error could be ‘proved’ was ultimately justified. His poem lived far longer than the lover he tells off, and is frequently read at marriage services, over four hundred years later.