Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Curl.

Today's poem is Sonnet 116 from William Shakespeare.

The very first episode of this podcast, I read another of his sonnets, but this might be the one that

is, if not his most popular, the one that

is considered by many to be his best. The most typical example of a great Shakespearean sonnet.

I'll read it quickly and then offer a few comments and then I'll read it again. So this is

Sonnet 116. Let me not to the marriage of

true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds or bends

with the remover to remove. Oh no, it is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.

It is the star to every wandering bark whose worths unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not times, fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass

come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of

doom. If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ nor no man ever loved.

Like all of Shakespeare's sonnets, this is a 14-line poem going A-B-A-B-A-B-C-D-E-F, with a couplet at the end,

rhyming G-G.

This is a great poem to talk about with your students to examine what Shakespeare is doing here and what he's talking about because he's constantly using reversals.

It's not uncommon for a reversal to show up in a sonnet towards the end in particular,

but Shakespeare uses reversals over and over again. And even the very

sort of detachment of the poem is a reversal in its own way. Traditionally, well, maybe not

traditionally, but commonly, the sonnet is written to the object of some sort of love, to the

...