A Critical Analysis Of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

Gatenby 1

Trevor Gatenby

Professor Grant Moss

English 3620

27 September 2014

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 has always been one of my favorite works because of the value he places on love. Although I have read this sonnet many times before, I was glad to see that it was a topic of discussion this semester because I wanted to gain a further understanding of this particular sonnet. This sonnet comes in stark contrast to the first 15 sonnets where Shakespeare insists that the young man should not be wasting away his beauty. Lines such as “Profitless usurer, why dost thou use”, and “For having traffic with thyself alone” (lines 7 and 8) from sonnet 4 suggest a lot about the young man. In an era where getting married and having children at an early age was expected, the young man seems to be doing neither. Rather, as these lines suggest, he is being selfish with his own beauty. Because of this, in the first 15 sonnets Shakespeare is pleading with the young man to preserve his beauty by having

He goes on to define love by what it doesn’t do, change. Claiming that love stays constant, even though people and circumstances may have inconsistencies; love never dies, even when someone tries to destroy it. Rather than being something that comes and goes, love is eternal and unchanging; so much so that the poet compares it to the North Star, which never moves in the sky and guides lost ships home. The use of the North Star as a metaphor, describes love because the reason we love is sometimes mysterious and perhaps incomprehensible, even though we can chart its location. This notion comes in contrast to the popular belief that falling in love can often be scary, often creating feelings of uncertainty and doubt. Shakespeare does a good job at wasting no time in saying that love is the most reliable entity that any individual can