Question

8. Read the sonnet.

Sonnet 116, by William Shakespeare
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.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheek
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.
Which of the following statements best describes how lines 1-12 in Sonnet 116 develop the ideas of the poem?
Each quatrain shows the speaker's feelings of love from a different perspective.
The meaning of the poem changes in the second quatrain. All of the quatrains express a single thought in different ways. The third quatrain develops ideas different than those expressed in the first two quatrains

Answer 1

Best Answer:

All of the quatrains express a single thought in different ways.

Step-by-step explanation:

In the first quatrain, the speaker asserts that true love is constant and enduring, regardless of external circumstances. In the second quatrain, he compares love to a fixed star that guides sailors even in stormy weather. In the third quatrain, he reiterates that love is not subject to the ravages of time.

All three quatrains develop the same central idea: that true love is eternal and unchanging. The speaker uses different images and metaphors to convey this idea, but he never wavers from his main point.

The last two lines of the poem (the couplet) serve to summarize and reinforce the speaker's argument. He states that if his assertion about the nature of true love is proven wrong, then he has never truly loved himself and no one else has ever truly loved either.