Sonnet 116: "Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds"

When you are reading a sonnet in a Renaissance sonnet-sequence, one thing you must never do, I tell my students, is to assume that the poet is the speaker in the poem. Usually there’s quite an ironic distance between the two. Petrarch isn’t simply the mooning and self-absorbed admirer of Laura. Sidney is by no means the self-destructive and often bi…