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The compass turns up in Donne’s love poems too – see, for instance, his ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’. The line ‘Or bends with the remover to remove’ may recall a pair of compasses: as Stephen Booth points out in his essential edition of the Sonnets, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Yale Nota Bene), the critic John Doebler argued in the 1960s that Shakespeare was drawing on the idea of the compasses as a symbol for constancy while things are changing (the idea being that since compasses were designed to draw a perfect circle, and the circle was a symbol for eternity, compasses represent constant or eternal love). But what such analysis tends to overlook is that we can interpret that last line in two very different ways: its meaning is either ‘I never wrote, and no man ever truly loved anyone’ or ‘I never wrote, nor did I love any man’.
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This emphasis on gay love (we can’t really say ‘homosexuality didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s day’: okay, people didn’t define themselves by their sexuality in the same way, perhaps, but as the Sonnets show, homosexuality was clearly more than the act of sex) in Sonnet 116 is neatly captured in the ambiguity of that last line, which has been criticised by some commentators for being too glib (after all, even if Shakespeare’s theory of love was proved wrong, it wouldn’t technically mean he’d never written anything). Shakespeare brings this home in the first line-and-a-half of Sonnet 116 by using the word ‘marriage’ but also the word ‘impediments’, conjuring up the part of the Christian wedding ceremony when the priest asks if anyone knows of any impediments why the bride and groom might not be joined in holy matrimony: ‘I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it.’ ‘Impediments’, then, is a loaded word here, and dripping with wry irony: there are impediments that would prevent Shakespeare from marrying the Fair Youth (assuming Anne Hathaway was out of the picture), because same-sex marriage is not an option in Shakespeare’s England. If what I’ve claimed here about love is proved to be incorrect, I never wrote anything, nor did any man truly love anything.’Īs we remarked above, Sonnet 116 is often analysed as a poem about a ‘marriage of minds’ between any two people – but the specific context of the poem (in a sequence of Sonnets addressed to, or about, a young man: the first 126 poems in Shakespeare’s Sonnets focus on the Fair Youth) gives such an interpretation a twist: it is marriage of minds, a Platonic love, which can never be recognised in the way that heterosexual love can be recognised through the solemn and binding covenant of marriage. Love doesn’t alter in the course of Time’s brief hours and weeks (time is, after all, fleeting), but remains faithful even until Doomsday, or the end of the world. Love does not serve Time the way a Fool serves the King, although Time’s scythe mows down every man in the end. Oh no, love is an eternal mark, like a beacon or lighthouse out at sea, that survives stormy spells and remains steady and strong love is the star guiding every boat out at sea, because it is like the stars whose position we have measured, but which remain something of a mystery to us. What people call “love” is not really love if it alters when it finds the other person changed, or gives in when someone seeks to remove that love. ‘May I never acknowledge any barriers to the notion of two people, who are made for each other, being joined together. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,īut bears it out even to the edge of doom.Īs ever, we’ll begin by paraphrasing the content of Sonnet 116, so as to provide a summary of the poem’s meaning.
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Within his bending sickle’s compass come Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. That looks on tempests and is never shaken