4:50 Are you okay, friend? Seems weird for you to place that like that. Hope you are doing well.

The sonnet hits me as if the author is trying to convince himself that the love he has for a long dead person is still the same as it was in life.

Hi Nerdwriter. Big big big fan of you're channel. And thank you so much for introducing me to The Sandman. Those stories are something else. Something mystic, awe-inspiring and other worldly. Can you please do some more Sandman videos? And a video on Terry Pratchett's Discworld please? That's if you're familiar with Discworld of course.

Interesting interpretation. I think it’s important to remember that “true” meant “faithful” and “admit” meant “let in” in Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare was basically saying love is not love if it isn’t faithful. In other words, you should love your beloved even their appearance changes because of Time. Losing your looks could be an impediment to love, but you shouldn’t let it be. If love doesn’t need to be faithful love to be love, then in Shakespeare’s opinion what (unfaithful) people do isn’t love nor has Shakespeare written a single meaningful sonnet about love because faithful love is the only love he espouses. I don’t think Shakespeare would have agreed with your idea of finding ephemeral things beautiful. In many other sonnets, he urges beautiful people to have children so their beauty won’t pass away. Great video all the same. Love the stuff you do about paintings.

WOW, SHOCKED. I totally woke up today thinking $hake$pear’$ $onnet 116 is definitely what i think seems. This is earth shattering good sir… thanks and good job but shit title

Also beautiful when she recites it as she’s staring at his estate from the hilltop - she’s the “speaker in the void” crying out to the distance because this poem represented to her what she had believed love to be, what she wanted love to be, and is mourning the loss of the meaning of the poem as much as him. I love that movie!!

I that it stands to condemn Willoughby, but more than that, to honor Brandon, to encompass what he was capable of both with the woman he lost and the woman whose love he gained. She and Willoughby married other people, but she married someone who could make her happy because he embodied the values in the poem. Willoughby, in betraying the thing he claimed to embrace, lost everything but the one thing he gained. He gave all that up for money.

@@BeeWhistler Right!! And then I guess it stands up to interpretation whether he embodies the values from the sonnet because he feels true love where Willoughby only fancied that he did (meaning in that case the writer had not been in error about love), or whether both had genuinely loved Marianne (and Eliza before her in Colonel Brandon’s case) and the poem errs because love itself cannot stand resolute and unchanged in the face of tragedy or death if one does not have the character to value love in that way. If that makes sense :) but either way, Colonel Brandon is the best!

@@HayleighPaige I think Sense and Sensibility highlights the unshakable nature of love which a strait forward and positive interpretation of the sonnet supports. Brandon is the perfect example. Steady and sacrificial, waiting patiently. I'm not a Shakespeare scholar but Nerdwriter's take on the sonnet seems revisionist.

​@@hettinga359 If we interpret the sonnet in earnest, there's zero reason for Shakespeare to mention "proof" or "errors". It'd be a Chekhov's gun. Are you really gonna argue that he stuffed the the last two lines (the most salient position in the sonnet) with meaningless filler?

That's just ... Wow! 🙂 🤗

What other sonnets are worth memorizing?

I think it is a beautiful intention to fill your memory with sonnets. I, for example, at the back of my "virtual" notebook 📓 have the baby chimp that puts his finger in his ass and smells it, followed by a hilarious fall back... #samesiesies

@@junedanieltamor9071 definitely sonnet 18 by shakespeare!!

@@junedanieltamor9071 agreed, 18 is classic, and so is 73! I also enjoy 130 because of its cheeky subversion of the trope of writing about the beauty of one’s love (which Shakespeare did plenty haha). And I also really like 128 :)

Yeah, I chortled at that point too. Ridiculousness.

Yeah, I noticed that as well. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” is probably more famous as well

"no, a summer's day is not a bitch"

Bro everyone learns Sonnet 116 at school in the UK

@@tomr6712 I went to school in the UK and din't learn it. And even if that were true, Sonnet 18 is so prevalent in culture that you barely even have to learn it. You at least know the first two lines word for word just from cultural osmosis

Has to be done. Traditional style lectures posted on KZfaq come across very badly. 🤨

Thank you for making this point. I am very much with you on this one. I honestly think it's breath-taking arrogance to tell us all that we have got it 'wrong'. It COULD mean what he says it means. It COULD be what it looks like - a meditation on love. Or it could be both. I'm with Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” But actually I find all the points in this staggeringly unconvincing.

Thank you for making this point. I am very much with you on this one. I honestly think it's breath-taking arrogance to tell us all that we have got it 'wrong'. It COULD mean what he says it means. It COULD be what it looks like - a meditation on love. Or it could be both. I'm with Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” But actually I find all the points in this staggeringly unconvincing.

I see the "Admit" statement as a sarcastic call out. He's saying-- "Other than those with a perfect marriage, don't let me knock down your white picket fence image, and *admit that you have faults" ----- "Admit, is a very precise word to use there.... Because from then on, he's referring to One persons "True love" never giving up: even when another "has alteration".. right "never bends to the remover" -- the remover of love; or someone who is giving up or changing direction (hints the compass reference). "A fixed mark" -- "never shaken in the wind storm" -- "bears it out till the edge of doom" ...... All of these things are talking about not giving up, or that real love never lets go-- even when it's one sided.

@@calholli I'd say it is most likely not sarcastic. The sonnet is a consolation for two persons who might have been in love but discovered an impediment.

I don't understand the expression "that bends with the remover to remove". Does it mean "that bends when the remover is removed"? Does it mean "that bends along with the remover in order to remove... something"?

Yes and they mention Time earlier in that line. Although it seems like death and time are often correlated and have similar symbols.

Sorry the sickle is a very set metaphor in English Lit, it can only mean death

Same meaning practically

Yup 👍🏻 Makes more sense in context too

Yes, thank you.

fancy running into you again ...

hey, you said it so. language is ambiguous because meaning is personal. and on this premise i was about to comment on this video.

I agree wholeheartedly. Let us not hold too tightly to our personal interpretations. The beauty of poetry is hearing and considering fully everyone's interpretations. To see a new piece in a new way because you were open to listening is one of poetry and literature's greatest pleasures.

Beauty of any art, I believe. Beauty in the eye of the beholder they say.

this and historia civilis :)

> _If this be error and upon me prov'd,_ > _I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd._ The fact that the couplet consists of a conditional is significant. Because one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. E.g. the conditional "if it rained -> then the ground is wet" can resolve to "it rained; => therefore the ground is wet" (modus ponens). But it can also resolve to "the ground is not wet; => therefore it has not rained" (modus tollens). From my perspective, the couplet (which is an unresolved conditional) deliberately invites the audience to challenge their conception of love. The challenge and the irony is the point. And since the couplet is the most unique stanza and has the final say of the sonnet, I imagine that the conditional is what Shakespeare wanted to emphasize. Had Shakespeare wanted to emphasize the fact that true love is somehow distinct from (and better than) secular love, I think the couplet would have straightforwardly contrasted the two types of love. E.g. maybe something to the effect of "as above; so below // yet cleaved by the firmament" or "the fates stretch the finite to the infinite // until it snaps". Or if the poem were aspirational, he could have continued on the star & ship theme. E.g. "the distance is great, // yet we sail to the edge". But instead, the couplet talks about "errors" and "proof", and the "writing" of the poem itself, as if to call doubt on its own thesis.

🤣🤣

So he needs to insert his dongle to get the juices flowing.. I get that

Agreed. Sonnet 18 is probably top thereas the most famous, and I’d argue 130 is probably a contender for second place.

@@freindlybookworm I have definitely heard both of those poems many times and have literally never heard a singlen line of 118 before watching this video

Thank you, I was hunting for this comment. The ill-guided overanalysis of the word choice yet misunderstanding of many of the words as Shakespeare would have used them (also "doom" most likely would have meant "fate" or "judgement" to Shakespeare, not "death" or "apocalypse" as we understand it today) is one of the many flaws in this video.

@@Mompellion Thanks so much for taking the trouble to reply. I think you're right. And I think it's very arrogant to assume that there is one interpretation of a poem, and it is yours, and everyone else is wrong.

GCSE lit my g

And everything is fleeting, which means everything is beautiful.

real gs can spit this one out on the regs geez

@@tomr6712 It seems my whole life has been a farce. I know...

And yet many fall out of "true love" :)

I always tell myself to remember that when Bill Shakespeare uses "true" he tends to use it the way we now use "faithful"--in the same sense as the famous line, "to thine own self be true."

We now use "true love"like a compound word with no smaller atom of meaning when, in fact, it has become tenuously connected to its original sense of committed love and used as a truism.

We now use "true love"like a compound word with no smaller atom of meaning when, in fact, it has become tenuously connected to its original sense of committed love and used as a truism.

Yes! I love nerdwriter but this interpretation seems out of step with Shakespeare's idealistic view of love. There are obvious literary links to a couple of biblical passages which have a similar high view of love. Song of Solomon 8:6-7 speaks of love as a flame which floods cannot quench and 1 Corinthians 15 (commonly read at weddings) says that it "bears all things" and "never fails." People may fail to live up to that ideal but it doesn't change the nature or definition of love. The use of negative language throughout the sonnet isn't meant to subvert the claims being made. It strengthens them by showing what love is able to overcome.

And so much more annoying

apology accepted

What does that acronym stand for, and in what context? I'm not up on this.

You're writing as if you believe the last two lines of the sonnet implicitly. But it is self-evident (or at least demonstrable) that there is love which is true yet inconstant. Positing otherwise is, to me, an over-extension of the latitude of meaning granted to poets. One must either believe Shakespeare insensible of the crudest nuances of love or acknowledge that the poem is employing its own fallacy as a literary device--which, from an author known for borderline self-indulgent wordplay, seems rather more likely.

Sadly, yes. And 18 is so annoying.

its definitely 18

A moment of genuine happiness, a break from the real world.

I'm a simple man, a see a Nerdwriter's video, I watch it.

Or we roll our eyes at how pretentious it is.

The sonnet always struck me as a disturbing mixture of true love, and its impossibility.

no, thats silly.

i think the author puts a lot of effort into his work and the readers collectively put even more effort to interpret it the result might be that we interpret things that the author did not intend to be there. that is part of artistic interpretation and contributes to its artistic beauty. its almost like he reader is also an artist. an artist in interpretation

It's theoretically possible that Shakespeare was just a monkey banging on a typewriter. Realistically, it's magical thinking to imagine that this sort of thing just happens by accident. People often wildly underestimate the amount of work that went into designing any given artifact. Cf. www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1741:_Work Art is a form of communication. In the ideal case, humanity would use something akin to a vulcan mindmeld to structure another's thoughts in a way which precisely mirrors their own. Short of that, we use sound and imagery as physical mediums to transmit signals that have been highly compressed, albeit lossily. The whole schtick of "reader's interpretation > authorial intent" is just a reflection of modernism's unhealthy obsession with objectivity. As if analyzing the text itself (which is objective and immutable, comparatively) were somehow more important than divining the contents of the author's mental state (which is subjective and icky). LPT: Instead of asking "what does this mean" or "is it correct or incorrect", try asking "what sort of mental state could have generated such an output". "But you haven't answered the question! Would the value of the work be negated if the author's original vision were simpler?" For the sake of the argument, let's suppose you found a cool shiny rock, which is obviously the product of random geological forces, and not a product of authorial intent. On one hand, value is in the eye of the beholder. On the other hand, there's value in recognizing artisanship, since the engine (which can produce lots of instances of output in the longrun) is often more valuable than a single instance of output itself. Thus, "maybe this sonnet is actually just gibberish" is about as useful an attitude as "Maybe the Eiffel Tower is actually just a cool shiny rock. I guess there's nothing useful for an architect/engineer to learn from this."

Don’t worry they do.