I Never Writ nor No Man Ever Loved

In typical English sonnet fashion, William Shakespeare deals with issues of love throughout “Sonnet 116.”   He discusses both what love is and what it is not throughout the three quatrains, only to prove his argument in the heroic couplet.   Shakespeare employs shifts in rhythm and various images in order to express the idea that true love does not change based on circumstance or time but remains ever pure and strong.
          Using shifts in the iambic meter, especially in the first quatrain, Shakespeare punctuates his main idea.   He wants to show that “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (2-3), and that it doesn't bend “with the remover to remove” (4).   To highlight this sentiment, Shakespeare employs shifts in the meter.   In the first line he begins with the iambic “Let me” but then follows that with a trochaic foot emphasizing “not”: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds.”   The second line begins with three iambic feet and then a strong caesura setting up the last four syllables:   “Admit in pediments. Love is not love.”   In those last two feet Shakespeare stresses “love” twice, and he does it symmetrically with the stresses coming at the beginning and the end of the phrase.   The end result, the first quatrain emphasizes what love is not, and the rhythmic departs from the iambic pattern help to subtly ingrain the point in the readers head but also in his ear.
            While not audible emphasis, the images in the second and third quatrains help to empress upon the reader what love really is.   The dominant imagery in the second stanza is that of a ship tossed in a violent storm: “It is an ever fixed mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken” (5-6).   However, throughout the first three lines of the second quatrain the image slips back and forth between comparing love to the ship and comparing love to the ships point of reference, “the star to every wandering bark.”   Shakespeare continues to use the language of contrast in the...