Reader-Response Criticism

SONNET 116 (SONNET)

BY: William Shakespeare 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

ANALYSIS 

The famous Sonnet 116 of Shakespeare can be criticized through the use of Reader-Response Criticism. As we can observe, Shakespeare is expressing his thought about love but he is allowing the reader to whether agree or disagree to him depending on what reader is thinking. As we all know, love is one of the most perplexful word because it has different meaning depending on who is reading it. Thus, Sonnet 116 express the author’s idea about love but the it doesn’t persuade us to accept what the author is thinking because we have our own thinking and we have the right to choose to stand on what we are believing.

Though this poem is short in length it is full of emotion. Shakespeare makes it known in the first line that he will not come between two people who are in love. He believes that love is strong enough to endure temptation and not waver. If love is altered by another, a “remover” of love, it was not love.

Time is love’s most powerful adversary, and this is demonstrated by the capitalization of the word making it a living breathing enemy of love. However powerful Time is, Shakespeare is certain that love is still stronger. “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks/ Within his bending sickle’s compass come.” The reference to the sickle shows just how much of a threat Shakespeare views Time. Like Death, Time too carries his sickle waiting to steal love that is based on the loveliness of youth. But of course true love cannot be fooled by Time. Love cannot be measured in “brief hours and weeks”; love is eternal; it “bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

The structure of the poem lends to the fluidity. There is a primary rhyme that is dominant with stronger rhyming and a secondary that has weaker rhymes but is still powerful in meaning. Out of alignment with the other lines, but still included in the single stanza, is Shakespeare’s final declaration. If what he has stated is proven to be wrong he “never writ, nor no man ever loved.” Since we know, of course, that Shakespeare has written and that men have loved, Shakespeare’s hypothesis about love must be true—it is constant.