High Grade Analysis of Sonnet 116

In this video, we cover:

• Context & Marriage Vows: How alluding to the "impediments" mentioned in Christian marriage liturgies challenges Elizabethan traditions of marrying for money, land, or politics rather than genuine connection.

• Synecdoche ("Marriage of True Minds"): Using "minds" to represent two compatible individuals whose values, beliefs, and souls match, framing love as an intellectual and spiritual bond.

• Polyptoton & Negation: Analysing repeated root words in different forms ("alters when it alteration finds" and "remover to remove") and how negating them proves that true love is fixed and immutable.

• The Maritime Metaphor: Decoding the "ever-fixed mark" (a navigational landmark or star) looking on "tempests" (crises and obstacles) without shaking, serving as a reliable guide for the "wandering bark" (lost human souls).

• Tone of Certainty & Ecphonesis: How strong adverbs like "never", imperative refusals, and the sudden exclamatory outburst of "O no" build an authoritative, passionate stance.

• Measuring Value vs. Height: The contrast between calculating a star's physical position through science and recognizing that its true worth remains immeasurable and profound.

• Time as the Adversary: Personifying Time with his "bending sickle" (a synecdoche for the Grim Reaper harvesting mortal life), showing that while youthful "rosy lips and cheeks" inevitably fade, love remains untouched.

• The Scale of Endurance: Juxtaposing the shortness of "brief hours and weeks" with love bearing it out all the way to the "edge of Doom" (the end of time / Judgment Day).

• The English Sonnet Form & The Coda: How three four-line quatrains present a logical, mounting debate, culminating in a final rhyming couplet where Shakespeare stakes his entire poetic legacy on being right.

• Monosyllabic Diction: The contrast between simple, mostly one-syllable vocabulary and the immense emotional complexity of the message.

Timestamps

• 0:00 – Overcoming Shakespearean Language & The Definition of Love

• 1:02 – Line 1: Impediments, Marriage Vows, & Context (Marrying for Money vs. Love)

• 2:21 – "Marriage of True Minds": Synecdoche & Deep Connection

• 5:35 – Lines 2–4: Polyptoton, Causality, & The Semantic Field of Change

• 9:20 – Lines 5–6: The Maritime Metaphor, The "Ever-Fixed Mark", & Tempests

• 11:28 – The Tone of Certainty & Ecphonesis ("O No!")

• 14:37 – Lines 7–8: The "Wandering Bark", Stars, & Scientific Knowledge vs. True Worth

• 17:52 – Lines 9–10: Love’s Not Time’s Fool, Personification, & The Abstract Made Concrete

• 20:01 – "Rosy Lips and Cheeks" & The Grim Reaper's "Bending Sickle"

• 23:17 – Lines 11–12: "Brief Hours and Weeks" vs. Bearing It Out to the "Edge of Doom"

• 24:48 – The English Sonnet Structure: Three Quatrains & The Logic of the Argument

• 27:47 – Lines 13–14: The Final Rhyming Couplet, The Coda, & The Ultimate Stake

• 31:05 – Monosyllabic Language: Simplicity of Words vs. Complexity of Love

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There are also study materials on the site that can help with this IGCSE:

• Fiction Technique Bank: An extensive revision toolkit outlining key linguistic and structural devices, complete with explanations and model examples to show you how to analyse writer's craft rather than just spotting techniques.

• Unlocking Shakespeare: A complete student guide packed with practical reading strategies, contextual breakdowns, and methods to decode Early Modern English without getting stuck in the language.

• Still I Rise Teaching PowerPoint: A fully resourced, line-by-line slide deck exploring form, structure, poetic devices, and historical context for focused study or revision.

• Poetry Technique Bank: A dedicated guide designed specifically to master poetic form, metre, rhyme schemes, and structural choices across both seen anthology and unseen poetry questions.

Lesson Transcript

0:00 – Overcoming Shakespearean Language & The Definition of Love

This is such a beautiful poem about love, but the problem is it is that when most students start reading it, they get completely thrown by the Shakespearean language and they don't know what it means. And they're trying so hard just to understand it that they then can't get to the sort of deeper analysis, different meaning. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure you fully comprehend this poem and you know how to analyze it, and if I may be so bold, that you actually come to quite like it, possibly even love it like I do.

When students are struggling to understand Shakespeare, part of that reason is the way he does his grammar—it's really different to us today. Now if you're looking for more detailed advice on how to read Shakespeare, you need to go check out my video on that, because I go through loads of detail on how you can actually read Shakespeare in English, understand Shakespeare in English way easier, and it'll help you out with his poems, his plays, whatever you're studying to do with him.

For the purposes of this, though, I'm just going to essentially translate things for you.

1:02 – Line 1: Impediments, Marriage Vows, & Context (Marrying for Money vs. Love)

So he says: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments." That basically means: I refuse to admit, I refuse to acknowledge that there can be obstacles and problems when you have a marriage of true minds.

So the key words that are worth pointing out here, first of all, is like the "impediments," okay? So that use of the word "impediment" is specifically cause that word actually gets used in marriage vows. Um, "impediment" just means like a problem or an obstacle to achieving something um, and in marriage vows, in typically like Western Christian faith, you have this line about if anyone knows of a lawful or just impediment why these two people should not be married, things like that. So it's this idea of during a wedding ceremony, you are supposed to be allowed to declare if you know some reason why these two people shouldn't get to be married. So what he's essentially alluding to is marriage vows, and the sort of official wording within marriage vows, and I'll come back to that in a second in terms of what the significance of that is.

Before that, though, now that we understand that what he's basically saying is "I will not accept that there are obstacles in a marriage of true minds," we need to break down that "marriage of true minds" bit and understand what he's saying there.

2:21 – "Marriage of True Minds": Synecdoche & Deep Connection

So first of all, obviously a marriage is between two people, right, but he's referring to them as "minds." And so what he's doing is he's using a technique called synecdoche. Now synecdoche is where you use a part of something to represent its whole under this idea that that part of it is a great representation, is a great symbol of the bigger picture of it. So in the case of "minds," he's using the mind to represent the whole of the people, the whole of their relationship. And if it's being called "true," that has connotations of being like real, of being, you know, fitting together, of matching up.

So when we look at the synecdoche of "minds," we can see that what he's talking about is the values, the beliefs, the personalities of the two people. So if they're true minds, it's two people that have a great connection with each other, they really get along, they really understand each other, you know, good friends. That basic principle we still have today that, you know, your spouse is your best friend.

So when we go back to this line as a whole then, what he's essentially saying is: I will not accept that there are obstacles in a love, in a marriage between two people that truly get each other and understand each other and want to be together. That is important historically speaking, contextually speaking. In the time that Shakespeare is writing, it's really common to not get married for reasons of love, but to get married for reasons of money, power, politics, building family relations. What Shakespeare is trying to explore here is what to him true love is all about. And clearly what we can see from this opening line, to him true love is not about: oh yeah, our parents are gonna make so much money off of our marriage, or ah yeah, I'm gonna have so much more political power by being married to you. True love, a proper marriage, is about two people that truly can connect with one another. And that's actually a pretty darn big deal for him to be saying something like that in this time period, where it is so uncommon for people, particularly in the higher classes, to be getting married for love.

So let's return to why he's got these marriage vows in this opening line to begin with. Marriage is essentially the most formal, legal way of looking at love; it's a legally binding relationship between two people. And as part of that, as part of marriage, there almost has to be this acknowledgment of obstacles and challenges that you face as part of being married. And he is saying: no, there are no obstacles, there are no challenges, you don't even need to have a vow about impediments if you are truly connected with one another, if you truly love one another. So he's almost in a way looking at what a condition should be of two people who get married: the fact that they should be able to be really connected to each other, be really brutally in love with each other.

5:35 – Lines 2–4: Polyptoton, Causality, & The Semantic Field of Change

And he goes now into that in more detail by looking at love itself, and he says: "Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove."

In other words, it's not love when your love changes if something about the other person changes. So love alters when it finds alterations—love should not change when it finds change. Similarly, "bends with the remover to remove"—so it doesn't give in to someone who's trying to get rid of the love; you don't stop loving someone if they maybe try to stop loving you back or something like that. So this image is all about love's perseverance.

Now in terms of breaking down the sort of craft of how Shakespeare is doing all of that, there's a couple of different techniques you want to have a look at. So the first is going to sound ridiculously confusing, but trust me, it's not that big of a deal, but it's called polyptoton. I'm going to let you, while I just highlight these words, I'm going to let you guess how on Earth you spell polyptoton, and then you can feel all cocky as I write it and you can see that you've got the spelling correct. And so polyptoton is when you repeatedly use words that come from the same sort of root, but you're using their different forms. So like "alteration" and "alters"—"alteration" is the noun, "alters" is the verb; "remover" is the noun, "remove" is the verb. So he's using the same word, but in its different word forms.

And why is he doing that? If he was saying love does this, right, if he was saying love alters when it alteration finds, love bends with the remover to remove, what the polyptoton essentially does is really beautifully create that feeling of causation. So because there is an alteration, something alters; because there is a remover, we remove. By using the same root word, it creates a really nice causational relationship between those two words.

However, what we've got here is, of course, a big fat "no" in front of it. So what you've got is the negation of that polyptoton, the negative version of that causality. It should not be that just because something changes, your love changes; just because the other person perhaps doesn't love you as much anymore, you don't love that other person. So what the negation of the polyptoton does is highlight that love should be fixed when other things change.

So if you have a look at our root words, right, and what is the pattern of our root words in the polyptoton? It's all about change: "alter," "remove," "bend" you could argue as part of that as well, like I would almost call that part of like a semantic field of change. Oh, that pink has just massively ruined the color of everything! So we've got this semantic field of change in the polyptoton being negated. What it does is create the opposite meaning to the words, right? Like when you say you're not cold, you mean the opposite of cold; when you say you're not happy, you mean the opposite of happy. So to have the semantic field of change be negated, he essentially creates the opposite meaning about love: love is constant, love is unchanging. So by exploring what love is not, he also is able to explore what love is.

So that's our first quatrain. Now a quatrain is just a group of four lines, and when we come back later to looking at the sort of whole structure of the poem in the fact that it's a sonnet, I'll say a little bit more about that, but we can think of this group as all being together as sort of looking at what love is not.

9:20 – Lines 5–6: The Maritime Metaphor, The "Ever-Fixed Mark", & Tempests

Once he's established that love is unchanging, he keeps going by saying: "O no! it is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken."

So the "it is an ever-fixed mark"—"ever-fixed mark" is like a navigation reference, so thinking of, and I do not profess to be an expert on sailing in any way here so bear with me, but back before any kind of advanced tech in our 16th century, that ever-fixed mark could be that like star in the sky that sailors can use to guide their ship, because they know like if that's the North Star, head that way and I'm going north, right? So it's a sailing reference, and we have that metaphor continued: "the tempest," that just means a really violent storm.

The ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken is calling love something that gives us our sense of direction, our sort of guide in life, our navigation, just like that ever-fixed mark helps our sailors know where they're going. So if we think about what the tempest represents, that's essentially the same as an impediment, right? It's a continuation of that idea: a very violent storm is the challenge that the sailor is facing in trying to sail their ship; it's the obstacle. There's potentially also an element of pathetic fallacy; maybe the tempest is like a symbol of like anger.

However, it's again negated: "never shaken." So you can see how serious that adverb is, "never." And we're going to come back to the sort of tone that's being created by words like "never," because he uses "never" a few different times, but it's really, really strong, like it's never shaken. So "shaken" would suggest, similar to our semantic field of change—in fact, you know what, I'm going to add it back into our semantic field of change as well—it's a continuation of that idea of: no matter what the obstacle, love is not affected. Instead, love just keeps being fixed and constant and guiding us through these difficult times.

11:28 – The Tone of Certainty & Ecphonesis ("O No!")

I'm now going to come back to that tone of the poem that is now starting to build over lots of different terms, and the tone is one of a sense of like certainty, but also passion as well. Like our speaker of this poem, who we don't really know anything about their identity—most people just treat it as if it's like Shakespeare, but it doesn't really matter who it is, it's just someone talking about their view of love—and this person feels so certain in their feelings and feels really strongly, passionately about it as well.

So I'm going to show you from what we've looked at so far: how are we seeing that certainty, how are we seeing that passion, okay? So first of all, that imperative in the "let me not," that refusal to accept that there can be these obstacles in love. Then you've also got the adverb like "never," that strength, that firmness of that adverb really showing that there is there is no other way about it, right? It's it's just not shaken.

You've also got this "O no!" Now this is a technique that, again, it's gonna have some really fancy sounding weird Greek name that is really not as complicated as it sounds at all, and the technique is called ecphonesis. And again, you can have a moment of trying to predict how I'm about to spell ecphonesis, and feel very cocky when you go and spell it correctly like me. So ecphonesis is essentially a short, emotional exclamatory in a poem. It can also be in a drama or in a song, but obviously here we're dealing with a poem. So it's a short exclamatory sort of outburst almost of emotion in a poem, because essentially he's being like: "Oh no! Like love is not that, love is this!" And it's just this really emphatic, determined expression of his view. And that's, of course, part of creating that tone of certainty and that passion with which he feels his view.

And it's also part, I think, of the sort of—as we go through this poem, he gets more passionate, more certain because he gets more metaphorical, he gets more sort of abstract in the way he's talking about love. So he's going to start off with talking about love in its most sort of legal, formal sense of marriage, and by the end, he's talking about doom and bending sickles' compass, and it's all going to get very deeply metaphorical. And I think that's part of reflecting that increasing passion and certainty with which he is speaking: the fact that he feels the need to speak more and more metaphorically.

I want to just add, by the way, I have seen versions of this sonnet where they don't use an exclamation mark after "O no"; they say "O no," comma. Just to stress, I would argue you can still call it ecphonesis, because even without the exclamatory scent—every—even without the exclamation mark, it is still an exclamatory phrase. It's still expressing a sort of strong passion, strong emotion in a very sort of brief phrase. So even if your version of this poem has a comma, not an exclamation mark, this analysis still stands.

14:37 – Lines 7–8: The "Wandering Bark", Stars, & Scientific Knowledge vs. True Worth

We're gonna go back now—and I will keep pointing out more things for tone as it comes up—we're going to go back to our metaphor, our sailing metaphor, because he extends that over the next two lines.

So remember, he's just finished telling us that love is this constant guidance that we can rely on in difficult times, and love is never affected by these obstacles, by these difficult times. He says: "It is the star to every wand'ring bark, / Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."

So "the star to every wand'ring bark"—that's a continuation of the "ever-fixed mark" and the "tempest" in the sense that an a wandering bark is just a ship. So the fact that it's "wandering" suggests that it's lost, so it's a lost ship. It is a star to every lost ship, so it's a guide to someone who is lost. So the wandering bark in this metaphor is arguably people, so it gives support, it gives purpose, it gives guidance to people who are lost.

He also then looks at the star metaphor from a slightly different angle, not so much a sailing angle um, that really speaks as well to the power of love, because he says: "Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken." So the "his" in that "his height be taken" is the star itself. If you think about stars on a scientific level, right, what he's essentially saying is that scientifically you can be like: that is a star, this is what it is, this is how big it is, this is how far away it is, this is its size, etc., you know? You can really break it down and analyze it in a specific scientific way, but that doesn't mean you can name its value; that doesn't mean you can name it worth.

And he's exploring this idea of how, yes, it is perhaps possible to look at love in a scientific way—and I say that thinking like Shakespeare is way ahead of his time in science, because even today science hasn't quite figured out love—but, you know, if we were to put a sort of modern perspective on it, you know those people who are like: oh, love is just a chemical balance in your brain designed to make sure you don't eat your babies, those kind of slightly cynical people who view love in a purely scientific sense? He is saying that is not the way to look at love.

So that "height be taken" is like essentially the attempt to look at love in a purely logical, scientific way. And it's like: yes, you can look at it that way, but even if you did, you don't fully appreciate what it can do. So that "unknown"—the connotations there of something immeasurable, something um mysterious and and incomprehensible—being used with "worth," and that idea of value and importance, it's stressing that knowing the sort of logical, the technicalities of love does not mean you understand the power and importance of love.

So we've now looked at the first eight lines of the poem. Let's recap what we've got about love so far: we've got that love stays constant, love is unchanging even in the face of difficulty, and love is something that gives us purpose and guidance and direction in life, and we cannot fully appreciate the value that love has to us in our lives.

17:52 – Lines 9–10: Love’s Not Time’s Fool, Personification, & The Abstract Made Concrete

We're gonna go now to the next four lines. So we have this personification first of all: "Love's not Time's fool." I would add, by the way, that I think all of the negation, that pattern of negation that we have throughout the poem um, is part of creating that tone of certainty. It's like: it's not this, it's not this, it's not this. Like he's sort of almost challenging all the different ideas of what love can and can't be; that's a big part of creating that tone of certainty.

And he carries that on here with: "Love's not Time's fool." So Time has obviously been personified in this line, and with him saying that love is not Time's fool, what he's essentially saying is that love is not affected by time. Now in terms of why he's personified time, I think there's room to argue that the way love has been written about throughout this poem, it has been given a sort of tangibility. If you think about it being something that can be altered, that can be removed—I won't go so far as it's being personified, but it has been given this feel via the metaphors of like a star and its height being taken and something that can be changed—it's been given this tangibility that is more than it should have, because it's an abstract concept that is intangible. By the way, just in case you don't know what the word "tangible" means: tangible is just something you can touch, right? So this pen is tangible; freedom is not, you can't touch freedom.

So he is making love feel more concrete, more real, more tangible, and I think the time is part of that. Time is part—by personifying Time, he makes that also more tangible, and he presents it almost as being like another obstacle, right? It's another impediment, it's another tempest, it's Time: it's a challenger, it's a threat, it's an enemy to love. Except, of course, he says it's not: he is not Time's fool. So he's doing that constant trick of: he sets it up that, you know, Time is the enemy of love, but then completely trashes that idea just with the negation of "not."

20:01 – "Rosy Lips and Cheeks" & The Grim Reaper's "Bending Sickle"

And then when he says: "though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle's compass come." I'm gonna break this down so you can fully understand what this all means. The "bending sickle's compass" is—it takes a minute to get, but the "rosy lips and cheeks" you'll totally be able to get super easy.

So the "rosy lips and cheeks" is more synecdoche—he's a real big fan of synecdoche is our pal Shakespeare. And so it's again, it's a part of something being used to represent a whole. In this case, obviously it's a human being, and all the focus is being placed on their rosy lips and cheeks. Why? To understand that, we need to understand 16th-century concepts of beauty. Guess what they considered rosy lips and cheeks: very beautiful! So the synecdoche is all about beauty, so hold on to that thought first of all, okay? We'll come back to analyze what it all means in a second, but the first comprehension we need to understand is that "rosy lips and cheeks" is beauty.

He then says: "Within his bending sickle's compass come." Now "his bending sickle"—who is that referring to? That is referring to death. When you think about the image of death, you might think of the image of the Grim Reaper. What's the Grim Reaper holding? A scythe. Shakespeare's used the word "sickle"—same concept. So the "bending sickle" is another synecdoche, because it's taking that whole of the Grim Reaper and focusing in on what he's right really associated with, what he's defined by: his scythe he uses to harvest lives.

Because again, if you're not familiar with like farming and what sickle or scythe is, which let's be honest, I'm not either, I don't know anything about farming, but the basic principle is that it is a tool that farmers use to like chop crops down. It's got like a round curved blade that they use to chop down crops, and so the Grim Reaper has a scythe or the sickle because it's like he is reaping, he's harvesting human lives. So the "bending sickle" is all a synecdoche for the Grim Reaper, for death.

And it says: "Within his bending sickle's compass." Now for that, what is the compass? Essentially this is where I'm going to do a little bit of art—are you ready to see how terrible I am at drawing? So if we think of our sickle on a super basic level, there is going to be, because it is curved, there is going to be when it does a movement, there is going to be a circle of crops that it can manage to get within that. That's its compass: it's what it can cover in one swoop, what it can take in one swoop.

So when we go back here then, what essentially is being said is: though beauty within the Grim Reaper's sickle can come, beauty is within his sickle. Now if beauty is within his sickle, that means the Grim Reaper can take it: beauty dies. Love's not Time's fool, though beauty dies. In other words: love does not decline with time, even though beauty fades.

23:17 – Lines 11–12: "Brief Hours and Weeks" vs. Bearing It Out to the "Edge of Doom"

We've then got these lines: "Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom."

So we've got a continuation of patterns we've already seen, right? We've got more of that semantic field of change being completely negated with "not." So it's more of that feeling of love being constant. In this case, it's constant over time, as represented—you know, we've been told love's not Time's fool, even with beauty fading, even with a lot of time.

So the "brief hours and weeks" is like representative of a short amount of time, and he's saying that love does not change over that short time. Instead, it "bears it out"—notice again how we've got another word connoting like perseverance, constancy, keeping on going with that bearing something—"even to the edge of doom." So we can think of that as being like the end of time, till the end of everything.

So you've got this juxtaposition between the short time of "brief hours and weeks" and the really, really long time of "the edge of doom." Bears it out, keeps going. So in other words: love lasts like essentially forever, right? Love is constant and unchanging. So it's not just this idea that love can remain over time, but it's love is also unchanging over time; there is no fluctuation to love, it is constant that even over the really long periods of time.

24:48 – The English Sonnet Structure: Three Quatrains & The Logic of the Argument

So to look at our last two lines of the poem, before before I look at the specific language in them, I need to take a step back to our tone of certainty and passion, and also to the fact that this poem is a sonnet, okay? This poem is a sonnet, specifically it's an English sonnet.

Now English sonnets are more famously known as Shakespearean sonnets. I'm gonna refer to it as an English sonnet in part just because of the just super stupid and basic reason that if it doesn't matter whether you say English sonnet or Shakespearean sonnet, say the one that's easier to spell and quicker to write!

So it's an English sonnet, and why does it matter that it is an English sonnet? Well, English sonnets all follow the same rhyme scheme: they are three quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme for the three quatrains, followed by a two-line rhyming couplet. So you can see if we look at the poem, you've got minds, love, finds, remove—so "minds" and "finds," "love" and "remove," ABAB. And then it keeps going: mark, shaken, bark, taken, CDCD; cheeks, come, weeks, doom.

Now I know you're thinking: how on Earth do "come" and "doom" rhyme? And I am with you there! It's an accent thing um. You just have to imagine that the way that Shakespeare said one of those two words rhymed. Like I've read before that there are theories that Shakespeare, because of the way the accents were at the time, kind of sounded like what we would associate with a pirate, so it's kind of like Shakespeare being like: "compass coom, the edge of doom!" And it kind of—oh my God, that's going to become some kind of hideous meme, isn't it?

The point is, he follows that rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Why does that matter? Well, if we think about this poem essentially like someone putting forward their argument in a debate about love, you know, in a discussion of "what is love," this person is setting forward their case.

Our three quatrains—and a quick reminder, quatrains are just like four lines of a poem; he hasn't separated them out into separate stanzas, but they still come in groups of four, and we can see how they come in groups of four in a second—but they come in groups of four, three groups of four, and they are like his sort of three overarching arguments. So we can think of this first one of what love is on a sort of legal sense and what it is not; he then has his four looking at it with the sea metaphor; and then he has his four looking at love and time. So he makes his case um across those three quatrains.

27:47 – Lines 13–14: The Final Rhyming Couplet, The Coda, & The Ultimate Stake

The two lines at the end that are a rhyming couplet, which just means they rhyme with each other—so whoops, "proved" and "loved," again you need to pirate the pronunciation there by overstressing the edge: "upon me proved, no man ever loved"!

But when we have that rhyming couplet, what this becomes in our logical argument is a coda. So a coda is just a sort of conclusion to a passage of a text, and so these two lines are his coda, and that's very common in the sonnets: the two rhyming couplets are like the final conclusion, the final message of the poem. So when we read and understand these lines, what we have to understand is that what we are reading is his final like, you know, chess move of: this is my conclusion, this is my end, this is my final argument.

And what he says is: "If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved." So if someone can show me and prove to me that everything I've just said is wrong, I've never written a poem: "I never writ, nor no man ever loved"—nobody's ever been in love!

So what he's saying is: I am so certain that this is what love is, that for you to say this is not what love is means that people haven't been in love before, because if they have been in love, they would know I'm right. Similarly, the reason he's saying "I never writ" this poem is not because it's a kind of denial of: oh, if I'm wrong, pretend I didn't say all of this. But a sonnet is a love poem; that's what sonnets are at their core, they are love poems. So when he is saying "I never wrote this poem," he's saying no one's ever written a love poem! If this is not what love is, then people haven't written about love, because when you write about love, this is what you're saying, this is what you're writing about.

So if we think back to that tone of certainty, he's essentially saying: I am so certain that if I'm wrong, love poems haven't been written—and I'm the freaking king of love poems!—and they've never been written, and no one has ever loved in the history of humanity. Like, those negations are so powerful in creating that tone of certainty and how he feels like he is absolutely right in his argument about love.

31:05 – Monosyllabic Diction: Simplicity of Words vs. Complexity of Love

So when we come to look at this poem overall, what we can see is that it's a freaking beautiful poem essentially saying that love is constant, love is unchanging, love is between two people who truly connect and understand one another, love is unaffected by any obstacle, love guides us, love gives us our purpose. And if any of that is wrong, then Shakespeare, the historical King of Love—even though he didn't know he was going to have that reputation—basically has never written about love, and no human being has ever loved.

That's this poem in a gist. It's examining what it means to love, who can love (people who truly understand each other), what love is not (changing, fickle), and what love is (persevering, constant, a guide).

One final thing I want to point out, now that we've just seen the entire poem, is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the words are monosyllabic. That means there are only one syllable long. So: "if," "this," "be," "error," "and," "upon," "me," "proved," "I," "never," "writ," "nor," "no," "man," "ever," "loved"—okay, a few two-syllables in there, but mostly they're only one syllable, so it's very simple in its language. Think about how over-the-top and flowery some love poems can be; this is not about that at all. This is really simple, and I think there's a really beautiful juxtaposition in the simplicity of the words with the complexity of the feelings that manages to capture that idea of: love is simultaneously something so simple and so basic that humans can just do, but at the same time huge and deep and abstract and powerful and complex.

And that is why I love this poem, and I hope that you now do too. See you later.