What Love is for Shakespeare
Like every other poet, mainly characterized by idealism and creativity, William Shakespeare views love as an eternal and ideal state of being. People often look at its grim features. But Shakespeare chose to distinguish love from pain, as what it naturally is. This essay will try to discuss love as seen by Shakespeare and written in his 66th sonnet. Shakespeare wrote the sonnet by citing important influences on love – time and place, beliefs, church and politics, life and death, change, and permanence.
He admits that there are impediments because of these factors, but he refuses to give in and be stopped by them. He said, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. ” These impediments for him are considered to be fixable, as he said in Much Ado (MA. II. 2. 1-4. ). Shakespeare disagrees on the kind of love that is easily broken or vanished. He thinks that it is permanent and doesn’t yield to heavy toil and suffering.
He said, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove:” This is actually common to everyone, particularly those who are new to such intense feeling and have not yet experienced the pain of their first love. However, Shakespeare thinks of love as an unyielding and enduring connectedness. He then compared it to a beacon used by sailors in shipping, unshakeable even by great waves and storms. “O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken. ”
Love guides every wandering soul like the northern star guides every sailor. He wrote, “It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. ” Also, love is not a plaything or a toy easily broken by ageing. “Love is not Time’s fool,” proves that love is not based on physicalities that rots as Time dictates. Love endures even Time and doesn’t change in distance served. The fleeting time is measured by weeks and hours but these don’t matter really for a love that endures change.
Death may end everything and given that we don’t believe in continued life after death, reincarnation perhaps, love will bring people to their end, still holding each other tight, even with their hands cracked by age. He said, “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. ” However love may seem perfect and eternal to Shakespeare, he still realizes that everything has an end. This is explained by a seemingly underscored concluding couplet of the sonnet. Love will always be a part of life that is temporary.
Nonetheless, he has already made his claim and established his points on the wondrous feeling brought by love to the extent that he seeks challenges from other people and willingly sacrifices the validity of all his sonnets, the melting pot of his romanticism, when this treatise on love is proven wrong. This sonnet has been read widely, like all of his other works, and became the basis for those who seek answers on the question of what love really is. It is never wrong to be idealistic, especially on issues as fulfilling as this. However, we must always accept that everything has its end.
Since everyone who feels such love is going to die anyway. Still, Shakespeare is one of those who aims high and gives this very particular topic the right for eternity and endurance. Love is never a simple thing, it is wide and complicated. It digs in people’s hearts and reveals what they truly are, without much consideration of what others might say or what time has kept ahead for him. It is worthy of the best imaginations, best literatures, and best descriptions no matter how painful it is at times, the happiest point of loving is always far eternal than that of other source of happiness.
