Following from Monday’s conversation about alliteration/assonance/consonance in Shakespeare’s sonnets, I noticed a cool effect in the first stanza of sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.

There are a lot of t sounds and d sounds (bolded in the quote)—when you read them out loud, they  force your mouth to close and your tongue to press against your teeth/palate (?). What’s cool about it is that it’s mimicking the impediment itself; Shakespeare uses the diction to amplify his meaning. I find this effect to be strongest in the first line—”not to” has two ts, back to back, which slows the momentum of the line and makes it very percussive. There are t sounds and d sounds throughout the rest of the poem, but I didn’t find them to be quite as noticeable as in the first stanza. They get displaced by th sounds and tsh sounds, which mimics the poem’s movement away from the subject of impediment to the subject of harmony.