SONNET 116

A.

Sonnet 116 is about love in its most ideal form. The poet praises the glories of lovers who have come to
each other freely, and enter into a relationship based on trust and understanding. The first four lines
reveal the poet's pleasure in love that is constant and strong, and will not "alter when it alteration
finds." The following lines proclaim that true love is indeed an "ever-fix'd mark" which will survive any
crisis. In lines 7-8, the poet claims that we may be able to measure love to some degree, but this does
not mean we fully understand it. Love's actual worth cannot be known it remains a mystery. The
remaining lines of the third quatrain (9-12), reaffirm the perfect nature of love that is unshakeable
throughout time and remains so "ev'n to the edge of doom", or death.

In the final couplet, the poet declares that, if he is mistaken about the constant, unmovable nature of
perfect love, then he must take back all his writings on love, truth, and faith. Moreover, he adds that, if
he has in fact judged love inappropriately, no man has ever really loved, in the ideal sense that the poet
professes

B.

This sonnet attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and is not. In the first quatrain, the speaker
says that lovethe marriage of true mindsis perfect and unchanging; it does not admit
impediments, and it does not change when it find changes in the loved one. In the second quatrain, the
speaker tells what love is through a metaphor: a guiding star to lost ships (wandring barks) that is not
susceptible to storms (it looks on tempests and is never shaken). In the third quatrain, the speaker
again describes what love is not: it is not susceptible to time. Though beauty fades in time as rosy lips
and cheeks come within his bending sickles compass, love does not change with hours and weeks:
instead, it bears it out evn to the edge of doom. In the couplet, the speaker attests to his certainty
that love is as he says: if his statements can be proved to be error, he declares, he must never have
written a word, and no man can ever have been in love.

SONNET XXX

A.

The first line is an excellent hook, it pulls the reader in with a general statement of truth. She draws
pictures of how love cannot save the lives of people who are ill but reminds us that without love we can
suffer greatly as well. Then she uses herself as an example of this fact and asks if there is anything that
could force her to give away the feeling of the love they share, or the memory of this night together. She
concludes, in her humanizing way, that it is possible. But not likely.

Millay knew how precious love was, and in this little sonnet, with its quaint rhymes and imagery, she
reminds us to cherish our loves as well.
B.

This is Millay's take on love. She is trying to be practical

in so many lines on what love is NOT. In essence she is saying
love cannot fulfill the basic necessities of life like food,
housing. Neither can it be a spiritual buoy for the lost and
sinking which of course I tend to disagree. According to her,
Love cannot also heal or alleviate bodily diseases or
discomfort although some men would rather consider death than
live without love. After these contemplative considerations,
Edna starts to reason out what possible things might make her
compromise her love. Certain things such as being "pinned down
by need, moaning for release (gasping for air could be another way to
describe it)" or succumbing to want (temptation, perhaps) beyond
her powers to resist. She might give up love for peace,
or exchange the memory of what she and her lover had just
experienced for some physical necessity and yet...maybe not at all.
The last line gives love's lasting attributes examined under the
harsh light of reality some hope.

TO THE MAN I MARRIED

She considers her husband her earth. The Earth that nourishes her, the Earth that gives her everything in
order to live.The Earth that provides for her. Her husband is also the air she breathes, the orbit that sets
off her directions in life.Not only does the Earth provides for her living, it also gives her resting place by
the time she rejoins her Almighty Creator.

It may seem that her Earth is the only thing that she needs but no! She also needs her Sky, her Almighty
Creator. But that Doesn't mean that she loves her Earth any less.

Her love for her Earth might be great but it is not comparable to the ocean. Not because her love wasn't
real or great or what, but because in reality, only the Almighty Creator can love as great as an ocean. But
she compares her love to the waves.

HOW DO I LOVE THEE

Sonnet 43 expresses the poets intense love for her husband-to-be, Robert Browning. So intense is her
love for him, she says, that it rises to the spiritual level (lines 3 and 4). She loves him freely, without
coercion; she loves him purely, without expectation of personal gain. She even loves him with an
intensity of the suffering (passion: line 9) resembling that of Christ on the cross, and she loves him in the
way that she loved saints as a child. Moreover, she expects to continue to love him after death.