Sonnet 116

The poem at a glance

This is a definition poem: not a love letter to one person but a meditation on the ‘marriage of true minds’, love as a bond of minds rather than bodies. It sits in a sonnet sequence widely read as addressed to a young man whose affections wander, which gives the insistence its edge: the poet, you might say, is in love with love, defending an ideal of constancy against real inconstancy. The opening echoes the marriage service (‘Admit impediments’), so the whole poem plays as a vow: love that alters when circumstances alter was never love at all.

Methods that matter

Form: the sonnet’s three-part argument

Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, three quatrains rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF and a closing couplet, and each quatrain has a job: the first says what love is not (it never alters), the second what it is (a fixed guiding mark), the third what it outlasts (Time itself). The steady, regular form matters as much as the argument: a poem about constancy that never once breaks its own pattern is practising what it preaches.

Navigation imagery: love as the North Star

Love is ‘an ever-fixed mark’ that looks on tempests unshaken, and ‘the star to every wand’ring bark’: the seamark and the North Star by which lost ships steer. The imagery concedes that life brings storms and wandering, people drift, like the young man of the sequence, but insists that love itself never moves. Its ‘worth’s unknown’, beyond measuring, yet it can still be steered by: love as something used daily but never fully understood.

Personified Time, and the couplet’s wager

Time appears as the traditional reaper, his ‘bending sickle’ harvesting ‘rosy lips and cheeks’, but ‘Love’s not Time’s fool’: beauty falls within the sickle’s sweep, love does not, enduring ‘even to the edge of doom’, the brink of Judgement Day. Then the couplet turns lawyer: if this be error and proved against me, ‘I never writ, nor no man ever loved’. Since he plainly has written, the logic dares you to disagree, a definition sealed with a bet the poet cannot lose.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘the marriage of true minds’ (l. 1)	Metaphor, marriage-service allusion	Love defined as a union of minds, not bodies or contracts: the ideal the whole poem will defend.
‘Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds’ (ll. 2–3)	Repetition, negative definition	The circling wordplay enacts the test it sets: anything that changes with circumstance never deserved the name.
‘the star to every wand’ring bark’ (l. 7)	Navigation metaphor	Love as the North Star: people may drift and stray, but the fixed point they steer by never moves.
‘Love’s not Time’s fool’ (l. 9)	Personification	Time the reaper harvests youth and beauty, but love refuses to be his servant or his joke.
‘I never writ, nor no man ever loved’ (l. 14)	Couplet, rhetorical wager	The poem ends by betting itself on its own truth: the existing poem makes the definition, by its logic, irrefutable.