Yesterday I woke and did the usual thing: checked to see if by some miracle my fortunes had reversed while I was sleeping. They had not, but on YouTube, the unholy algorithm had gifted unto me a video about Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’. The video was six months old, and had been seen by more than 190,000 people. The claim this well-produced and polished video made, was that Old Bill’s most familiar* sonnet was ‘not what it seemed to be’. Although a commonplace at weddings, and in Jane Austen adaptations, this ostensibly straightforward sonnet, oft delivered as a canonical statement about the constancy of Love Itself, is apparently replete with vexing complexities.
Our YouTuber asserted that the first and most fundamental of these ironic flourishes is a certain radical abstraction; then an alarming ambiguity; and finally, a slew of contradictory subtleties. Look, the Tuber suggested, at the poem’s concluding couplet, and see how learned readers, like you and I, cannot help but reckon there the uneasy dramaturgy of a poet whose awareness of a self-consuming oblivion is belied in declarative energies. The existential uncertainties are so momentous in those last lines, that they tear at the very fabric of the poetic act: if his surmise is wrong, they portend, then the very verse we read must cease, somehow, to be.
Even in the sleep-crusted distress of a new-dawning day, this analysis struck me as self-evidently stupid. It’s true that certain open controversies of this sort do adhere to sonnet 116, but mostly these purlins of interpretation abound because the creation of errant obstacles, and the fostering of vain bewilderments, is customarily necessitated aft half a thousand years of madding analysis has been pursued on an immortal author’s oeuvre. Surely, though, amongst sensible readers, it is more likely to be taken as consensus that the apparent ‘radical abstraction’ away from contextual personages in this sonnet is due to the song’s parenthetical shift from the players and lovers, to the conceptual characterisation of Love Itself that is the song’s singular subject. In the surrounding sonnets, which are notorious for their mote of difference amidst the whole, human uncertainties abound, and there the poet ricochets around the wild and woolly boundaries of true love and its fundaments. But here, in the definitional discourse of 116, it is farce to say that uncertainty pertains to making meaning. Belief, rather, is the theme of this song. If there is a certainty on earth, it is here: a lonesome refuge for the poet in pursuit of knowing love. An age of great belief, from which Shakespeare’s power springs, gives this song its singularly unvexed alchemical authority.
In Lord Byron’s ‘Ode to a Newfoundland Dog’, he summarised mankind thus: ‘Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat, thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!’ All true. It is so. We are all too human. But a question arises in these lamentations: why should such animated dust lament its ignobility? If we are so base (as we must be) why doth we mourn for our degraded state? Byron’s sorrow is divine, I think, in the sense that it could come directly from the God of Genesis, who despaired so bitterly of his creation that even in the throes of expunging most of it out of being, he threw up his omniscient hands and surrendered to the knowledge that his creative act was afflicted with an enduring blight – declaring, despairingly, that mankind’s imaginations are: ‘only evil, continually.’
Why then does the divine bother with us, and we with it? Well, while it is self-evident that we are more dust than star, our redemption has always resided in the knowledge that there is a measurement to be made between us and higher things. Outside ourselves, some eternal potential exalts amongst the seeming emptiness; it passes through our little life, like northern lights. If on certain nights, when there is accord amongst the heavens, and we have eyes to see, so there it is, the gleaming certainty of a higher nature. A kind of love, of which we know enough, at least, to call by half-familiar names.
Sonnet 116
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 wand'ring 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 prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
*Bill’s ‘most familiar’ sonnet according, at least, to our online critic.