"Sonnet 116" was written by the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare.

Most likely
written in 1590s, during a craze for sonnets in English literature, it was not published until 1609.
Although Shakespeare's sonnets were not popular during his lifetime, "Sonnet 116" has gone
on to become one of the most universally beloved and celebrated poems in the English
language. In magnificent, moving terms, the poem describes true love as an enduring,
unbending commitment between people: a bond so powerful that only death can reshape it.
Though the poem is moving and romantic, it risks at times falling into hyperbole or cliché: some
readers may doubt the plausibility—or the sincerity—of its depiction of love.
Literary Context
"Sonnet 116" was most likely written in the 1590s, during a craze for sonnets. Though poets like
Thomas Wyatt began to write sonnets in English in the 1530s and 1540s, the form did not
become widely popular until the 1590s, after the posthumous publication of Sir Philip Sidney's
Astrophil to Stella.
This means that the sonnet arrived in England relatively late: by the time Wyatt began writing
sonnets in the early sixteenth century, the form had been popular in Italy and France for several
hundred years. The form thus came to English with baggage, in the forms of many tropes and
clichés associated with it. For instance, sonnets were usually organized in long sequences—
chains of many related poems which, in a certain light, would tell a story (usually a story of
unrequited love). Almost all Renaissance sonnet sequences are narrated by a male speaker who
is passionately in love with an unattainable woman—so much so that he seems on the verge of
madness, out of control. Poets also often used nautical metaphors to express this state of semi-
madness: describing themselves as doomed ships, whose captains were negligent or drunk or
forgetful.
This context is evident in Shakespeare's poem, though he has worked to reverse them. Instead
of describing a desperate, unrequited love, Shakespeare's speaker describes a union that binds
together two willing participants in a long-term, stable union. And instead of an out-of-control
ship, the speaker presents his readers in lines 5-8 images of safe, responsible navigation.
"Sonnet 116" is thus a poem that's highly self-conscious about its own literary context: it relies
on the reader's knowledge of that context for some of its effect. The poem is all the more
moving and beautiful because it refuses a tradition of desperate, unrequited love to instead
depict what stable happiness might look like.
Summary
I don't want to accept that anything can come between two people who truly love each other.
Love isn't true love if it changes when things get tough, or if it lets itself be diminished. No,
instead love is a steady guide, like a lighthouse that even during a storm is never shaken. It is
the star that guides ships as they wander at sea: its value is too great to be measured, but it is
still used by sailors to help them navigate. Love is not fooled by time, though pink lips and
cheeks are diminished in time. Love doesn't change as hours or weeks go by, but continues on,
unchanged, until death itself. If I'm wrong—and if my own behavior serves as evidence that I'm
wrong—then I've never written a poem and no one has ever loved.
THEMES
Love and Change
Over the course of Sonnet 116, the speaker makes a number of passionate claims about what
love is—and what it isn’t. For the speaker (traditionally assumed to be Shakespeare himself,
and thus a man), true love doesn't change over time: instead, it goes on with the same intensity
forever. The speaker establishes this argument from the poem’s opening lines, boldly declaring
that love isn't really love at all if it bends or sways in response to roadblocks. Instead, he argues
that love weathers all storms. It's like a star that sailors use to navigate, providing an unmoving
reference point they can use to plot their course across the globe. Love, then, is something that
perseveres through "impediments," obstacles, and difficulties without losing any of its passion
or commitment.
As the poem progresses, the speaker considers more kinds of change and extends his initial
argument. In lines 9-10, he adds that true love doesn't falter even as beauty fades—
represented in the poem by the image of youthful, rosy cheeks losing their vitality. Because
love isn't primarily concerned with the body, it's not affected by aging. In lines 11-12, the
speaker generalizes his argument even further by claiming that love doesn't change under any
circumstances. It goes on, he claims, “to the edge of doom.” In other words, only when a lover
dies does love finally change or end.
The speaker is so confident in his argument that he’s willing to issue a bet: if he’s wrong, then
love itself is impossible, and “no man [has] ever loved.” In making this bet, he puts up his own
behavior as evidence. Here, the speaker acknowledges that he isn't simply an observer of love,
but himself a lover. His own relationships might be measured against the standard he's
advanced here—and he offers confident assurance that his love does live up to this standard.
This means that, beneath the sonnet's generalizations about what love is and isn’t, the poem is
itself a declaration of love.
At this point it's important to note that this sonnet is part of a sequence of love poems,
traditionally believed to be addressed to a young man. Their relationship, as depicted in the
Sonnets as a whole, is tumultuous, full of infidelity and gusts of passion. There is considerable
disagreement among scholars as to whether this context should affect the interpretation of
Sonnet 116. If it doesn’t, the poem is a powerful statement about love, addressed to all readers
in all times. But if it does, the poem comes across instead as an attempt to repair a damaged
relationship, a personal plea directed to a particular person; the speaker is trying to prove to
the young man that he does love him in spite of everything, and that his love won't change.
For a generous reader, this will be a romantic statement of affection. For a more skeptical
reader, it raises some questions. The speaker hasn't just described love as something
unchanging; the poem paints a picture of love as a sort of eternal ideal far from the messy
reality of real people's lives. It's a star—unattainable and inhuman. In a way, this image of love
ceases to be something that humans can actually build and instead becomes something they
can only admire from a distance.
The speaker has engaged in hyperbole to defend his position, invoking all lovers in all times in
line 14. This, along with the poem’s idealism, might make the speaker feel a bit unreliable;
some readers may wonder how realistic the speaker’s account of love really is, and find it
grandiose instead of intimate. The poem’s claims about love can't necessarily be taken on face
value, then: they should be evaluated for their sincerity and plausibility—and in these respects,
they may be found wanting.
Real Beauty vs. Clichéd Beauty
To express the depth of their feelings, poets frequently employ hyperbolic terms to describe
the objects of their affections. Traditionally, sonnets transform women into the most glorious
creatures to walk the earth, whereas patrons become the noblest and bravest men the world
has ever known. Shakespeare makes fun of the convention by contrasting an idealized woman
with a real woman. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare directly engages—and skewers—clichéd
concepts of beauty. The speaker explains that his lover, the dark lady, has wires for hair, bad
breath, dull cleavage, a heavy step, and pale lips. He concludes by saying that he loves her all
the more precisely because he loves her and not some idealized, false version. Real love, the
sonnet implies, begins when we accept our lovers for what they are as well as what they are
not. Other sonnets explain that because anyone can use artful means to make himself or
herself more attractive, no one is really beautiful anymore. Thus, since anyone can become
beautiful, calling someone beautiful is no longer much of a compliment.

The Responsibilities of Being Beautiful

Shakespeare portrays beauty as conveying a great responsibility in the sonnets addressed to
the young man, Sonnets 1–126. Here the speaker urges the young man to make his beauty
immortal by having children, a theme that appears repeatedly throughout the poems: as an
attractive person, the young man has a responsibility to procreate. Later sonnets demonstrate
the speaker, angry at being cuckolded, lashing out at the young man and accusing him of using
his beauty to hide immoral acts. Sonnet 95 compares the young man’s behavior to a “canker in
the fragrant rose” (2) or a rotten spot on an otherwise beautiful flower. In other words, the
young man’s beauty allows him to get away with bad behavior, but this bad behavior will
eventually distort his beauty, much like a rotten spot eventually spreads. Nature gave the young
man a beautiful face, but it is the young man’s responsibility to make sure that his soul is
worthy of such a visage.
 Hyperbole
The speaker of Sonnet 116 has a number of significant ideas about love—ideas that are worth
taking seriously and evaluating. However, his presentation of those ideas doesn't always have
the same seriousness and credibility. At several moments in the poem, the speaker lapses into
hyperbole, making rather some outlandish claims.
For example, in the poem's final lines, the speaker says that his ideas about love are so solid, so
indisputable, that, if he's wrong, no one has ever been in love before. This is a broad and
unsupported generalization—a generalization which includes the whole of human history until
the present. This would be difficult to prove in any kind of convincing fashion, but, of course,
the speaker isn't particularly interested in proving anything. Rather, he wants to impress the
reader/listener with the force of his passion and his rhetorical commitment—that is, with his
willingness to stray into hyperbole.
However, as is often the case with hyperbole, the extravagance of the speaker's words may
have the opposite effect: instead of building confidence in the speaker, it may cause us to
question his passion—which might sound a bit inflated, pretentious, or puffed up.
This final moment of hyperbole is in keeping with the tone of the poem so far, in that the
speaker has been very rigid and idealistic in his description of love throughout. Love is "an ever-
fixed mark" that "never" falters; in fact, it lasts even to the "edge of doom"—that is, until death
or doomsday. One could argue that this idea of love is so unrealistic as to be meaningless; all
relationships change and have the potential for disturbances, even if minor. To say that
relationships based on real love never feel even the slightest tremor of trouble seems a bit
naive. Again, though, the speaker wants to impress upon the reader the sheer force of his own
beliefs (and, it follows, the intensity of his own love for the potential recipient of the poem).
How someone interprets this final moment of seeming exaggeration, then, reflects on their
feelings about the poem as a whole: whether they think that the speaker is being sincere and
genuinely romantic in his efforts to describe a transcendent love which human beings should
strive for, or if he is being so dramatic that his words lose some of their power.
IMAGERY
Two central images are used in Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.
Stanza two presents the image of love as constant as a star used by navigators to determine the
location of ships. The image is an extended metaphor that makes up stanza two, and reveals
love that stays constant through storms and is never shaken.
Stanza three presents the image of love's resistance to and immunity from time. Love is not
time's fool or jester or clown, and love will not yield when time and the grim reaper try to bring
death to love. Love will last until the final judgment. What love is not--the fool--is personified
to form the first image, and is followed by the image of the grim reaper.
Setting
"Sonnet 116" provides little information about its setting. Though a reader may assume that the
poem is set in Renaissance London, likely during the 1590s when Shakespeare wrote it, the
poem itself resolutely refuses to allude to its location in time or space. (Of course, there are a
few clues in the poem that it belongs to an earlier historical moment: for instance, sailors no
longer rely on the stars to navigate; they use GPS!) The poem refuses to specify its setting
because it seeks to make a general, universal statement about love—a statement which will
always be true, in any setting. It presents itself stripped of setting so that any one might
encounter the poem and apply it to their own life.