Sonnet 20: An Explication

Sonnet 20: An Explication

        Explications discuss and explain poems of all shapes and forms. Sonnet 116 ponders love in its most perfect nature. Taking the form of Iambic Pentameter, Shakespeare shows the world how unchanging true love really is.         

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 opens in a manner that brings to mind being at an actual wedding. The sonnet reads, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” (Shakespeare, lines 1-2). These lines are stating that there is no reason for two true-minded individuals to not be wed. Shakespeare is stating that he should not object.  This appears to be an allusion to the familiar words spoken during a wedding ceremony.

“Which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove” tells the readers that true love cannot be shaken by the winds of change (Shakespeare, lines 3-4). If life circumstances are altered and everything becomes different, true love will remain the one constant. Shakespeare reiterates that sentiment by following up these two lines with the statement, “O no! it is an ever-fixed mark” (Shakespeare, line 5). This line solidifies Shakespeare’s belief that love is never wavering.

Shakespeare then moves on to use the metaphor of a boat and what would seem to be a lighthouse to describe how love will be your guide through life. Life is the moving object, or boat in the storm, and love is the lighthouse, or fixed landmark that will guide you home.

The third quatrain reveals love as immortal. Time will try to fool love by changing one’s appearance and fading their physical beauty. However, this will not affect true love. Instead, true love “bears it out even to the edge of doom” (Shakespeare, line 12). Love is eternal and cannot be changed, no matter what happens. This is Shakespeare’s definition of what true love really is. Shakespeare ends his thoughts by saying, “If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved” (lines 13-14). If he is wrong about what love really is then no one has ever been in love and everything that he has ever written is worthless. This is Shakespeare’s way of saying that his definition of love is the only true definition. If he is wrong, then no one is right.