Sonnet 116, first published in 1609, is one of the most universally beloved poems authored by

the illustrious English poet and playwright William Shakespeare. The poem expresses a
meditative view on the enduring, dependable, imperishable essence of the ideal love by
explaining what is love and what is not love; ergo, it provokes the concept of Platonic love.

Primarily, by making use of various literary devices, the poet constructs the portrayal of
quintessential love to tell what is love and what is not. In the initial quatrain, the author
repudiates that the “marriage of true minds”, which is the spiritually and mentally union of the
lovers, can be intervened by “impediments”. “Love is not love” if it cannot surmount the
hindrance, or if it changes finding a change of heart in the loved one and allows itself to be
abolished. By this, the poet concedes that under no circumstances would genuine love be
alterable or eliminated. The subsequent quatrain embarks on defining the stalwart perpetuation
of true love by using metaphorical expressions. Love should be “an ever-fixed mark” – the
nautical beacon that can survive storms (“tempests”) and “never [be] shaken”. In other words,
that love should be immovable, unchangeable regardless of the unpredictable havocs. Besides,
love is an everlasting guiding principle for the lost, the “wand’ring bark’, in a sense that it is
compared with the pole star, the prominent star in celestial navigation. Although its “worth [is]
unknown” and far transcends human comprehension, its “heights” or importance is undeniable.
In the third quatrain, personification demonstrates that “Love’s not time’s fool” as it is not
insignificance even though it faces the annihilation of Father Time. The physical beauty (“rosy
lips and cheeks”) is mortal, evanescent, fragile “within his bending sickle’s compass”. The bent
instrument may destroy the beauty as if it cuts down the grass, but the impermanence of life is
redeemable by love. Love’s longevity, therefore, sustains the “brief hours and weeks” of time, it
persists up till the end of time which is the Doomsday with the apocalyptic visions.

Shakespeare’s idealization of an optimal love can have a kinship with Platonic love. The first
point is that Shakespeare’s definition of love has propinquity to Plato’s idea about the highest
form of love which is the “beauty absolute, separate, simple, everlasting” and the origin of all
that enduring worldly beauty. That is the harmony of the synchronized souls, that thereupon
encourages one to reach the ultimate and universal truth and to achieve the fruitfulness of the
utmost excellence. In short, that divine kind of absolute love shall never be obliterated, despite
material mortality.