Shakespeare's sonnet 116 is one of my favorites to read out of all of the poems in the poetry packet. It is about the difference between "OMG I like, totes love you," and "I would travel to the ends of the earth for the sole reason of holding you once more in my arms because you are the other half of my soul and I could never bear to live without you."
The feelings expressed in the first set of quotation marks is this weak, dispassionate love that crumbles when it's novelty wears out, or, "[love] alters not with his brief hours and weeks". The type of love expressed in the second set of quotation marks represents the pure, honest and beautiful love that everyone dreams about; the love that is there to stay with you "to the edge of doom". Shakespeare discusses this difference in every line. He condemns the false 'love' by acknowledging what true love is. True love "looks on tempests, and is never shaken". He goes on to state that if he is wrong and proven thus, then no man has ever known love.
In sonnet 118, Shakespeare heads down a different road; one full of damage control. A little while after the elated feelings from the "honeymoon" phase of his relationship die down, he takes a glance at other lasses that don't have "black wires" for hair or perhaps their lips are far more red than coral. Who knows? The point is, he's taking some heat for having a wandering eye.
To redeem himself, he wrote an explanation in the form of a sonnet. And what did he compare his love to? Delicious food. His excuse? Wanting to make their love sweeter by "bitter sauces did I frame my feeding", meaning his appetite was being satiated by other mistresses that obviously must not have tasted that good in the first place; he went crawling back to his woman, begging for forgiveness using this sonnet... eventually. Because he "found a kind of meetness To be diseased ere that there was true needing"; he justified his actions as being beneficial to their relationship. He 'made himself sick' by using other girls to avoid getting sick of his 'love'. "But thence I learn, and find the lesson true, Drugs poison him that so fell sick of you." Behold, ladies and gentleman, the last resort. He was 'poisoned' by the other women because he was just so lovesick over his gal. Right. Let's file that away right next to the excuse, "She was a succubus! If I didn't bed her she would take my soul." Then your soul should have been painfully devoured from your pathetic body, you miserable cheating scum.
What was that? You thought he said that love was "an ever-fixèd mark"? Indeed he did say such a thing. I guess that's the tragic irony of human nature, showcased at its finest. So if this love isn't shaken by the tempest of his actions after all, then I don't know the true meaning of forgiveness. But it does prove that I know the meaning of stupidity.
Great posts here, nice job reading the poems... remember to write a post about City Eclogue too!
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