Sonnet 116

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William Shakespeare

Last updated 9:45 AM on 4/13/26
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5 Terms

1
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AO3

  • Nautical imagery

    • Elizabethan Era - enlightenment of nautical travel

    • ‘Star’ - unmoving Polaris

    • Part of the 1-126 sonnets addressed to the ‘fair youth’ - Henry Wriothesley, to whom Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are dedicated

    • romantic - not turning into the language of dark and painful love

  • ‘True mindes’

    • Rebelling against the norms of marriage and suggesting that marriage should be due connection not convenience

  • ‘Impediments’

    • Evoking the marriage sacrament

  • ‘Times’

    • allusion to the Grim Reaper

    • Scythe - the crescent of a full circle

    • part of a compass

    • death is inevitable but love endures

    • Biblical reference - judgement day

  • Shakespeare most famous for figurative descriptive language and metaphors - ‘it is the star’

2
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AO4

  • Love and time/enduring love

    • Remember

    • To His Coy Mistress

  • Idealised love

    • She Walks in Beauty

  • Gatsby

    • Idolatry is not love

    • lack of genuine connection

    • unattainable

    • Characters cannot sever themselves from the past

    • ‘It is the star to every wandering barke’

    • ‘nothing except a single green light, minute and far away’

    • ‘Lov’s not Time’s fool’

    • ‘Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can’

3
New cards

AO5

  • New Historicist - Tyson

    • ‘it is permeated by the desire to escape history’

    • Sonnet 116 - permeated by a desire to escape time but views history as only a continuation of current love

4
New cards

AO5

  • time is destructive, not love

    • personified in the scythe

  • Ledger - there is deeper trouble in the sonnet, overly idealised and fantasised

    • ‘sandwiched between between three sonnets which discuss the philosophical question of how love deceives both eye and mind and judgement, and is then followed by four others which attempt to excuse the poet’s own unfaithfulness and betrayal of the beloved’

5
New cards

AO5

  • Roessner - love as fragile

    • emphasis on what love is not turns the sonnet into a negative defensive position

    • highlights underlying tensions and anxieties about love