John Green Reads Poetry

And then there’s sonnet 116 which is the one you’re most likely to hear at somebody’s wedding. This one is also addressed to the young man. This is in some ways the high point of Shakespeare’s love poetry although it’s perhaps a more insecure poem than it seems at first. Here it’s not poetry that is the greatest thing ever, although Shakespeare definitely gives a tip of his hat to his own writing, but love itself.

Now just as in sonnet 18, there’s worry of the impermanence of human life and beauty. How rosy lips and cheeks will be undone by time and death. But hey, that won’t matter because love will last eternally, or at least until the, quote, edge of doom.
That’s what Shakespeare hopes anyway, but maybe he’s isn’t certain because he’s playing some games with the language here and he’s showing how easily change and fickleness can happen. Like when you look at or read the poem, notice how easily words change in it. Alter to alteration, remover to remove, maybe he’s worried that love might change too. I mean look at that first line: “Love is not love.” And look at all the ‘no’ an ‘nors’ and ‘nevers’ in the poem.

But in the end he does come to an empathic conclusion he says that of all the things he’s said about love are in error, quote, ” I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” Obviously he has written and men have loved, so his defense of love is solid right? Well, but then remember the line, “Love is not love.” There are all kinds of explorations in Shakespeare’s work about what real love is. But for me at least, the best line of the poem is when he writes that love is not time’s fool. True love, to Shakespeare, is not beholden to time. It doesn’t answer to time. It somehow transcends time.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.