William Shakespeare, "Sonnet 116"

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
진실한 정신들의 결합에서
mind의 사용
Admit impediments. Love is not love
어떤 장애물도 허락하지 않을거예요. 사랑은 사랑이 아니예요
결혼식의 장면이 강렬하게 들어가 있음
Which alters when it alteration finds,
어떤 변화가 나타났을 때 변화한다거나
Or bends with the remover to remove.
방해꾼이 제거한다고 해서 굽어지는 것 또한 사랑이 아니예요
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
정말로 아니죠! 사랑은 영원히 고정된 지표예요.
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
폭풍을 내려다 보지만 결코 흔들리지 않죠
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
사랑은 모든 방황하는 배들에게 별(북극성)과 같아.
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
그것의 가치는 알려져 있지 않지만, 별의 각도는 잘 볼 수 있죠.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
사랑은 시간의 어릿광대가 아니고, 장미꽃 입술과 뺨이
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
시간의 굽은 낫의 사정 거리 안에 들어 올 지라도
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
사랑은 짧은 몇 시간이나 몇 주안에 변하지 않고
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
심지어 심판의 날까지 사랑은 시간을 견뎌내요
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
만약 내가 말한 것이 틀린 것이고, 그 오류를 증명한다면,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
나는 절대 글을 쓴 적이 없고, 누구도 사랑한 적이 없습니다.

Love and Change

● The speaker makes a number of passionate claims about what love is—and what it isn’t. For the speaker, true love doesn’t change over time: instead, it goes on with the same intensity forever. He argues that love weathers all storms. It’s like a star that sailors use to navigate, providing an unmoving reference point.
변하는게 아니다라고 계속 강조
수평선을 재서 각도를 알려주는 이정표 같은 존재

● As the poem progresses, the speaker considers more kinds of change and extends his initial argument. In lines 9-10, he adds that true love doesn’t falter even as beauty fades—represented in the poem by the image of youthful, rosy cheeks losing their vitality. Because love isn’t primarily concerned with the body, it’s not affected by aging.
심판의 끝까지 버티는 것이 사랑임

● In lines 11-12, the speaker generalizes his argument even further by claiming that love doesn’t change under any circumstances. It goes on “to the edge of doom.” In other words, only when a lover dies does love finally change or end.

● The speaker is so confident in his argument that he’s willing to issue a bet: if he’s wrong, then love itself is impossible, and “no man [has] ever loved.” The speaker acknowledges that he isn’t simply an observer of love, but himself a lover. The poem is itself a declaration of love. At this point it’s important to note that this sonnet is traditionally believed to be addressed to a young man. The speaker is trying to prove to the young man that he does love him in spite of everything, and that his love won’t change.
Nymph는 시간이 영원하지 않다고 말하지만 셰익스피어는 자신의 말이 맞다고 생각

● For a generous reader, this will be a romantic statement of affection. For a more skeptical reader, it raises some questions. The speaker hasn’t just described love as something unchanging; the poem paints a picture of love as a sort of eternal ideal far from the reality of real people’s lives. It’s a star—unattainable and inhuman. In a way, this image of love ceases to be something that humans can actually build and instead becomes something they can only admire from a distance.
이정표같은 존재

Symbols

● Mark: in line 5, he has in mind a specific kind of mark: a seamark, i.e. a beacon or lighthouse. These structures serve to warn sailors to avoid certain areas filled with reefs or rocks. This warning is potentially life-saving information during a bad storm or in the dark, when a ship might otherwise enter dangerous waters without realizing it. The lighthouse and the beacon are thus frequently symbols for positive forces that guide people through the dark and difficult patches of their life, showing them dangers they might not otherwise see. By associating love with such marks, then, the poem argues that love itself is a solid, guiding force in people’s lives.

● Star: Renaissance sailors used stars to help them navigate, measuring their own position against the height of the stars. However, in contrast to a lighthouse (man-made, something you can touch), stars are inhuman and unreachable. The star thus serves as a symbol for a kind of ideal, perfect love—beyond what anyone might achieve in a real relationship.

Sickle

● A sickle is a sharp, hooked agricultural tool. Before the invention of mechanical reapers, it was used to harvest grains and cereals, which a farmer would bend down to cut at the root.
mortality를 상징
구부러지고 사람을 해칠 때도 사용

● In traditional depictions, death carries a sickle or scythe: he is the harvester of souls, who, like the farmer cuts down people at the root. The sickle is thus often used as a symbol of mortality or of the fragility of human life, which can be cut short easily and unexpectedly.

● This is how the sickle is being used in this poem, too. Here, time uses its sickle much as death would: it harvests youthful beauty—represented by the “rosy lips and cheeks” in line 9—and transforms the body with age, much as harvesting a lush field reduces it to a barren place.

● Love is immune to time and its sickle; it will not diminish or grow weak with age, and is stronger than the frail, mortal body.

Hyperbole(과장)

● At several moments, the speaker lapses into hyperbole, making rather some outlandish claims. In the final lines, the speaker says that his ideas about love are so solid, so indisputable, that, if he’s wrong, no one has ever been in love before. This is a broad and unsupported generalization—a generalization which includes the whole of human history until the present. This would be difficult to prove in any kind of convincing fashion, but, the speaker isn’t particularly interested in proving anything. Rather, he wants to impress the reader with the force of his passion and his rhetorical commitment with hyperbole.

● However, the extravagance of the speaker’s words may have the opposite effect: instead of building confidence in the speaker, it may cause us to question his passion—which might sound a bit inflated, pretentious. This final moment of hyperbole is in keeping with the tone of the poem so far, in that the speaker has been very rigid and idealistic in his description of love throughout. Love is “an ever-fixed mark” that “never” falters; it lasts even to the “edge of doom”—that is, until death or doomsday.

● One could argue that this idea of love is so unrealistic as to be meaningless; all relationships change and have the potential for disturbances. To say that relationships based on real love never feel even the slightest tremor of trouble seems a bit naive.

● Again, though, the speaker wants to impress upon the reader the sheer force of his own beliefs (and, it follows, the intensity of his own love for the potential recipient of the poem).

● How someone interprets this final moment of seeming exaggeration, then, reflects on their feelings about the poem as a whole: whether they think that the speaker is being sincere and genuinely romantic in his efforts to describe a transcendent love which human beings should strive for, or if he is being so dramatic that his words lose some of their power.

마지막 2행에서 가장 뚜렷하게 과장의 느낌이 남
자신이 그렇게 해봤는데 자신의 말이 틀렸다면 자신은 글을 쓴 적이 없고 아무것도 없다

Marriage

● “marriage” describes a ceremonial union between two people—often licensed by the state and the church. During Shakespeare’s life, the concept of marriage was in transition. In the medieval period and the early part of the Renaissance, marriage was often a formal arrangement between families, which they entered into to transfer property or to secure political advantage.
결혼과 사랑의 가까운 거리, 정신의 결합에 대해서 어떤 방해를 허락하지 않을 것임.
중요한 것은 남자에게 보내는 시.
가문과 가문의 결합이었던 결혼. 남녀만의 문제라기보다는 귀류적 의미의 결혼

● However, during and after Shakespeare’s life, a new concept of marriage emerged, which stressed companionship—that is, the love and bonds between two people. Shakespeare uses the word in that sense, emphasizing the way that marriage is a matter of shared values and mutual sympathy.

● This new kind of marriage also opens up the possibility of using the word metaphorically. Instead of referring exclusively to a religious or legal contract, marriage might refer to any intimate bond between people or things. The lover that Shakespeare addresses throughout the first 126 of his sonnets is a young man: he and the speaker cannot literally get married. The speaker may be interested in asserting that their relationship is like a marriage, even if it lacks the stamp of legal approval.

Form

● “Sonnet 116” is a typical Shakespearean sonnet which is divided into two sections: the first twelve lines of the poem(three quatrains) and the final two  (a rhyming couplet).
12/2 volta
짧은 공간인 만큼 그전에 했던 말을 반복하거나 다른 생각
해당 시는 자신의 말 과장함

● The shift between line 12 and line 13 is called the volta or turn, and this shift in the organization of the rhyme also marks a shift in its content. In the Petrarchan sonnet the speaker has a lot of space before the poem ends to change their mind, to explore new possibilities because the volta falls between lines 8 and 9.

● In the Shakespearean sonnet, the volta comes very close to the end of the poem so there isn’t much space for the speaker to reconsider or to change course. For this reason, the volta often serves to confirm or summarize the rest of the poem. This is certainly the case in “Sonnet 116,” where the poem’s final lines reaffirm the speaker’s position.

● While the “if” that begins line 13 could be read as the speaker granting a moment of hesitation, allowing himself space for reconsideration, this is abruptly countered in line 14: rather he is setting himself up to emphasize his point. He must not be wrong, and the poem’s form itself refuses to entertain any arguments to the contrary.

Meter

● “Sonnet 116” is in iambic pentameter. For example, line 7 is exceptionally smooth:

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

The regularity of the meter mimics the solidity and dependability of the star itself. In its smooth, unblemished meter, the line becomes an image of love, embodying its changeless nature.

● There are other lines where the meter is slightly more irregular. For example, lines 6 and 8 have feminine endings:

That looks | on temp- | ests and | is nev- | er shaken;

Whose worth’s | unknown, | although | his height | be taken.

These lines contain an extra syllable, making them each 11 syllables long. However, this extra syllable doesn’t significantly disrupt the rhythm of the lines: the stresses still all fall in the correct spots, maintaining the iambic rhythm. These metrical substitutions contribute to the sonic richness of the poem, but they do not significantly affect its interpretation.

Rhyme Scheme

● “Sonnet 116” follows the standard rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet:  three quatrains and a final couplet: ABABCDCDEFEF BB
변하는 것보다 원래의 rhyme을 가져오는 것이 변하지 않았다는 느낌을 줌

Throughout, the speaker uses strong, perfect rhymes. In his rhyming, the speaker is confident and smooth, fully capable of making his argument—and making it sing. A number of the poem’s rhymes seem like they ought to be treated as slant rhymes—“love” and “remove” in lines 2 and 4; “come” and “doom” in lines 10 and 12. For Shakespeare’s early readers, however, these would’ve been full rhymes.

● In the final two lines, the rhyme scheme shifts. Traditionally, the final two lines are rhymed GG, introducing a new rhyme sound. “Sonnet 116” fails to do that, returning instead to the rhyme of lines 2 and 4 (with a slight difference—“lov’d” instead of “love”).

● This return to the poem’s earlier rhyme sound has several effects: 1) it calls the reader’s mind back to the poem’s initial argument: that love does not change, even when faced with difficulty, 2) it reinforces that argument: just as love does not change, so too the poem resists novelty, returning to the same rhyme sounds at critical moments.

Literary Context

● “Sonnet 116” was most likely written in the 1590s, during a craze for sonnets after the posthumous publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil to Stella.

● Almost all Renaissance sonnet sequences are narrated by a male speaker who is passionately in love with an unattainable woman—so much so that he seems on the verge of madness, out of control. Poets often used metaphors to express this state of semi-madness: describing themselves as doomed ships, whose captains were drunk.

● This context is evident in Shakespeare’s poem, though he has worked to reverse them. Instead of describing a desperate, unrequited love, Shakespeare’s speaker describes a union that binds together two willing participants in a long-term, stable union. And instead of an out-of-control ship, the speaker presents images of safe, responsible navigation in lines 5-8.

● “Sonnet 116” is thus a poem that’s highly self-conscious about its own literary context: it relies on the reader’s knowledge of that context for some of its effect. The poem is all the more moving and beautiful because it refuses a tradition of desperate, unrequited love to instead depict what stable happiness might look like.

Historical Context

● The 1590s, when Shakespeare most likely wrote “Sonnet 116,” were a time of relative peace and prosperity in English society. Queen Elizabeth was at the height of her power. English forces had also recently defeated the Spanish Armada, substantially diminishing the threat of foreign invasion.
정치의 안정 -> 내면에 집중할 수 있던 시기

● In this climate, English poets turned their attention to matters of the heart. Indeed, several of Shakespeare’s most celebrated texts dealing with love belong to the decade, including Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It.

● However, this peaceful period was short lived: by 1603, Elizabeth had died and the crown had passed to the much less popular, much more divisive James I; by the 1640s, the country had descended into civil war. A poem like “Sonnet 116” is thus a document of a society in transition, descending into serious conflict—yet enjoying a final moment of peace and calm before the storm sets in.