Sonnet number one hundred sixteen and number one hundred thirty provide a good look at what Shakespeare himself defines as love. The former describes the ever-enduring nature of true love, while the latter gives an example of this ideal love through the description of a woman who many call the Dark Lady. Through the combination of these two sonnets Shakespeare provides a consistent picture of what love should be like in order to bear it out even to the edge of doom(116, Ln: 12). To me the tern maker used by Sir Philip Sidney to describe the poets first and foremost duty would refer to the creation process, which produces the end text. The discourse of the poet is to take an emotion or event they up to that point was purely felt, and make it into flowing words, which in turn reproduce the initial emotion. The poet is therefore a maker of poems as well as emotion. This emotion would not be present however if the poet were not human experiencing the ups and downs of everyday life. Therefore I feel that the poet is first and foremost human, and therefore susceptible to human needs, feelings, and emotions, and secondly a maker. In Sonnet number one-hundred sixteen Shakespeare deals with the characteristics of a love that is not times fool, that true love that will last through all (Ln: 9). This sonnet uses the traditional Shakespearian structure of three quatrains and a couplet, along with a standard rhyme scheme. The first and third quatrains deal with the idea that love is an ever-fixed mark, something that does not end or change over time (Ln: 5). Shakespeare illustrates this characteristic of constancy through images of love resisting movement and time in the first quatrain. To Shakespeare Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds, / or bends with the remover to remove(Ln: 2-4). Love is something that does not change when it finds and alteration in the object of its affection. Love merely adapts or does not n...
