Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 attempts to define love, by telling both sides bad and good and what it is and is not. In the initial segment of Shakespeare’s sonnet, the speaker says that love “the marriage of true minds” is immaculate and constant; it does not “admit impediments, and it doesn’t change when it discover changes in the cherished one.
In the second quatrain, the speaker tells what love is through an analogy: a directing star to lost boats (“wand’ring barks”) that isn’t vulnerable to storms (it “looks on whirlwinds and is never shaken”). In the third quatrain, the speaker again portrays what love isn’t: it isn’t defenseless to time. Despite the fact that magnificence blurs in time as ruddy lips and cheeks go in close vicinity to “his twisting sickle’s compass,” love does not change with hours and weeks: rather, it “bears it out ev’n to the edge of fate.” In the couplet, the speaker authenticates his assurance that adoration is as he says: if his announcements can be turned out to be blunder, he proclaims, he should never have composed a word, and no man can ever have been infatuated.