Sonnets? By Billy S. and Others

Sonnet- type of poetry that consists of 14 lines and falls into one of two categories, Shakespearean or Italian. Interesting to note these categories are seemingly experts in the language of love. Iambic Pentameter is the other requirement for a poem to be a sonnet, simply put 14 lines with 5 beats / emphasis per line, not just syllables like in Haiku. Most sonnets seem to be 3 groups of 4 lines sharing a common thought and 2 lines to finish or summarize the thought.
Sonnet #116 Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds a link to the sonnet. I am not convinced I have a the right slant on this sonnet but would like to share what it says to me and my thoughts about love. In the first group of 4 lines we have "Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds." This is a deep and profound thought that begins to provoke other deep and profound thoughts. "Love is not Love," the statement says to me one must first be familiar with the definition of what love is; many scholars and philosophers have been trying to define this since time began. Love and the definition of love are seen through the lens of our own experiences and culture (as are most definitions in our vocabulary), but love is a more important definition because of the affect it has on our lives. Bill says love is not love when it alters after an alteration is discovered. The apostle Paul had to write a letter to the church folk in Corinth to define love for them, in this letter he starts with all the things love is not and ends with what love does. Other examples exist pointing to the true nature of love and the common theme shared by all these views of Love is, True Love is NOT conditional. It is true there are different types of love, like the love a parent has for a child, love between friends, love between intimate friends, or love for humanity as a whole, and even more examples.... All of these are different but have the same common thread, Love is NOT conditional. If there are conditions that have to be met then it is not love but something else, maybe not something bad, just different, meaning true love should not be confused with other feelings, though it often is. The other thing this group of lines points to is that in finding the alteration you feel the need to remove it. Does this mean when we discover something about the person we are in love with we either want to change what we discovered or change the way we feel? ... No! I contend we substitute or mislabel some feelings as love when they are not, when we are young we often confuse love with infatuation and lust, because we do not know yet what true love is.
The second group of 4 lines, start with what I think is the purest ideal of love, "Oh, no! it is an ever-fixed mark." this says to me more of what I have already said, Love, True love is pure and not based upon the idea that someone needs to earn it in order to be loved by someone. Nor that they need to act a certain way, have a certain amount of money, be a certain size, think only certain thoughts, no true love is mark beyond all marks and sets no precondition on who gets to give love or who gets to receive. True love is not tempted by every pretty / handsome person that walks by. Bill says it like this, if when you are asea and you are headed to see your true love then that is your path. you will not stray from your path to chase after every ship you see that looks worthy of chasing. I got all that from the second group, ever fixed mark, not tempted, ship that has been measured to determine if its carrying precious cargo. (Shakespearean experts look at these lines as they refer to a lighthouse and the north star, I'm not saying they are wrong, these are just my ideas of these lines.) No, love only looks to love and grows deeper, love is the greatest treasure known to exist. The search for true love takes us many places in the course of our life and when we really find it, we are engulfed feelings and emotions that hardly have words to fully explain.
The third group of 4 lines, speak to the enduring qualities of true love, "But bears it out even to the edge of doom." Love bears all, Love endures all, Love conquers all, even time.
Shakespeare ends this sonnet with if he is proved wrong about love then no man has truly loved and all that he has ever written about love were just wasted words and wasted time.