answer this quotation please ( “Sonnet 116”
Do you think this poem demonstrates a positive or negative view of love? Write your response as a paragraph, stating your answer to the topic question in your topic sentence and a summary of your opinion in the concluding sentence. For supporting details in the body of your paragraph, use examples and quotations with in-text citations (Shakespeare 1) to support your viewpoint)
this is the poem
Sonnets
They contain 14 lines. The term sonnet derives from the Italian word sonetto, meaning “little song.” It
became, by the 1200s, a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and utilized iambic
pentameter. A sonnet is fundamentally a dialectical construct that allows the poet to examine the nature
and ramifications of two usually contrastive ideas, emotions, states of mind, beliefs, actions, events,
images, etc. by juxtaposing the two against each other, and possibly resolving or just revealing the
tensions created between the two. A sonnet shows two related but differing things to the reader in
order to communicate something about them.
The English (or Shakespearian) Sonnet
The English sonnet has the simplest and most flexible pattern of all sonnets, consisting of 3 quatrains of
alternating rhyme and a couplet:
a b a b
c d c d
e f e f
g g
Each quatrain develops a specific idea, but one closely related to the ideas in the other quatrains. Not
only is the English sonnet the easiest in terms of its rhyme scheme, calling for only pairs of rhyming
words rather than groups of four, but it is the most flexible in terms of the placement of the volta.
Shakespeare often places the “turn,” as in the Italian, at line nine. The third quatrain generally
introduces an unexpected sharp thematic or imagistic “turn,” the volta. Equally, Shakespeare can delay
the volta to the final couplet, as in this sonnet where each quatrain develops a metaphor describing the
aging of the speaker, while the couplet then states the consequence–“You better love me now because
soon I won’t be here.”
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (a)
Admit impediments, love is not love (b)*
Which alters when it alteration finds, (a)
Or bends with the remover to remove. (b)*
O no, it is an ever fixèd mark (c)**
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; (d)***
It is the star to every wand’ring bark, (c)**
Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken. (d)***
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks (e)
Within his bending sickle’s compass come, (f)*
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, (e)
But bears it out even to the edge of doom: (f)*
If this be error and upon me proved, (g)*
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (g)*
