Sonnet 116

William Shakespeare · Published 1609 · One of the sixteen compulsory anthology poems on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1)

Love defined by everything it refuses to be — an argument that will not bend, even at the edge of doom.

Two ways to study it

• Grade 9 Notes — condensed and exam-focused: 1 full character studies, 4 themes, quotation analysis, thesis statements and essay plans.
• The Complete Guide to Sonnet 116 — the long version: 13 chapters from the world behind the text to the examination.

The characters covered

• The Speaker — The definer — a voice that legislates love rather than wooing with it

The themes covered

• Constancy — love as the fixed point — The poem's single subject: love defined as the one thing in the universe that does not move — argued by negation, imaged by navigation, and staked on a wager.
• Time and mortality — Time is the poem's antagonist — personified, armed, and conceded almost everything: the poem's strategy is not to defeat Time but to move love outside his jurisdiction.
• Definition, argument and proof — Before it is a poem about love, this is a poem about DEFINING — what it means to fix a word's meaning, and whether such fixing can ever be proved.
• Certainty as performance — The poem's least obvious theme is its own tone: total confidence, performed so insistently that readers have long asked what the insistence conceals.