Fractures

The stated theme of the poem is “marriage,” the bringing together of two disparate things (1). This could be in the sense of a legal union, what we today think of as marriage, but “marry” could also be used in a much broader sense, to unite anything that was once separate. It is ironic, then, that structurally this is a poem that relies on fracturing much more than it does on unity.

The most notable poetic device in this poem is enjambment, which is a poetic device in which the ends of lines contain no punctuation but instead continue into the next line. For many, enjambment is way of disrupting a thought by breaking it across lines. This is the case in sonnet 116, which features four enjambments in just fourteen lines. There is one in almost every sentence of the entire poem.

This use of enjambment creates...