Gatsby / Pre-1900 love poetry

How does Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare present love

True love is never-changing and withstand all the forces of time and nature

Sonnet 116 form and structure

• fixed structure (Shakespearean sonnet) mirrors love’s consistent reliability

• Regular rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter reinforces reliability/stability of love

“love is not love / Which alters when it alteration findes” - S116

AO2 - repetition of ‘alter’ reinforces the poet’s point. Shift from negation to assertion shows staunch belief of speaker.

AO4 - “Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!” p.106, ch.6 - Gatsby, like the poet, believes that love does not alter due to outside forces and powers. He is proved wrong.

“It is the star to every wandring barke, / Whose worths unknowne, although his higth be taken.” - S116

AO2 - Metaphor of love as a lighthouse to lost ships, an allusion to love’s guiding properties. ‘worthes unknowne’ - paradoxical metaphor for love’s immeasurability.

AO3 - When the poem was written the nature of stars was unknown but they were still used to navigate - this is not the case for modern readers

AO4 - “It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock.” p.90, ch.5 - Gatsby’s allusion of love as ‘worthes unknowne’ has been shattered as his vision of Daisy loses its mystery

“If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” - S116

AO2 -The poem ends on the hyperbolic assertion that if he is disproved then all love in meaningless, there is a defensive tone that reveals the strength of his convictions.

AO4 - “in her heart she never loved any one except me … I did love him once - but I loved you too.” p.125-26, ch.7 - Gatsby’s idealized notion of love is shattered and he realised in this moment that his belief (similar to the poet’s) is incorrect. The power of old money, time, and contextual pressures is too much and any love they had has gone