![]() ![]() His father was a merchant who devoted himself to public service, attaining the highest of Stratford’s municipal positions-that of bailiff and justice of the peace-by 1568. Shakespeare was born in Statford-upon-Avon on or about April 23, 1564. ![]() But perhaps the strangest juxtaposition regarding “Sonnet 116” is this: though the sonnet is probably one of the least understood in Shakespeare’s 154–poem sonnet sequence, it is a perennial favorite and a popular anthology poem. ![]() The final couplet uses a monosyllabic vocabulary in an especially difficult example of reductio ad absurdum. ![]() Rather than learning what love is, the reader is taught what love is not even when the speaker begins to use metaphors to describe the constancy and endurance of this emotion, he discusses what love does not do, what is not known about it-and prefaces these observations with a “o, no.” To add to the confusion, the poem’s simultaneous and opposing messages are conveyed in simple words, but with complicated logic. An affirmation of the certitude and the enduring qualities of love, “Sonnet 116” (first published in 1609) is nevertheless remarkably negative in tone. ![]()
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