Shakespeare presents love and lust as two very different things. Although one is the perpetrator of the other and both are kin, lust is presented as love’s darker cousin. The imagery used to depict love in Sonnet 116 shows how noble and altruistic the ideal of love is. Shakespeare presents it as unconditional in the line “it is an ever-fixed mark”, and assures the reader that it does not “alter when it alteration finds”. Shakespeare …showed first 75 words of 651 total…

…showed last 75 words of 651 total…presenting) this more destructive emotion. Although he admits it is “A bliss in proof”, proved, it is “a very woe”. Even though he spends the three quatrains presenting lust as obsessive and base, Shakespeare admits that it’s unavoidable. “All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” The rhyming “hell” can also be interpreted as a reference to sexual imagery, as in Sonnet 144.