Sonnet 116

            Romanic poems and sonnets are the types of literature that attract me the most. However, Sonnet 116 is the special piece of literature which allures me and sets itself in the position which is more attractive that any other romance. It is special because that of its uses of the idea of love, the imageries and metaphors, the descriptions, and the sincere and certainty the poet places in the sonnet. Sonnet 116 completely entices me.
             Essentially, this sonnet presents the extreme ideal of romantic love: it never changes, it never fades, and it outlasts death and admits no flaw. What is more, it insists that this ideal is the only love that can be called "true"--if love is mortal, changing, or impermanent, the speaker writes, then no man ever loved. (Line 14) The basic division of this poem's argument into the various parts of the sonnet form is extremely simple: the first quatrain says what love is not changeable (Lines 2-4), the second quatrain says what it is a fixed guiding star unshaken by tempests (Lines 5-6), the third quatrain says more specifically what it is not "time's fool" (Line 9)--that is, subject to change in the passage of time, and the couplet announces the speaker's certainty. What gives this poem its rhetorical and emotional power is not its complexity; rather, it is the force of its linguistic and emotional conviction.
             The language of Sonnet 116 is extraordinary in that it frames its discussion of the passion of love within a very restrained, very intensely disciplined rhetorical structure. With a masterful control of rhythm and variation of tone, the heavy balance of "Love's not Time's fool" (Line 9) to open the third quatrain. With the declamatory "O no!" (Line 4) to begin the second, the speaker makes an almost legalistic argument for the eternal passion of love, and the result is that the passion seems stronger and more urgent for the restraint in the speaker's tone.