Emotions suck when you're fresh off a breakup. (But hey I can still rhyme!)

1. Shakespeare likens love to more than one unaltered natural phenomenon in order to prove his vision of its constancy, comparing the emotion to tempests, (6) stars (7), and aging and death (9-10). While Muth asserts that perfect constancy transcends Shakespeare’s personal experience, she makes a solid show of support in that he finds imperfect constancy by the end of 116. Part of the delicacy and strength of love is that it is meant to reason with and overcome doubt. Love does not shirk its duty or avoid responsibility “when it alteration finds” (3) and it does not bend or allow itself to simply be removed when an easier route is presented. True love is no one’s fool, and Time is no exception. The constancy of love is plainly illustrated when Shakespeare claims that love does not alter with the relatively brief span of man made time, or the effects of that time on the human body. Time does not affect the human spirit, which carries love. The final two lines of the sonnet read as a challenge, as if Shakespeare is saying ‘I have obviously written a great deal, and men have obviously loved before me, therefore love is real and I can not be disproven.’ This challenge may come off as desperate, but love can easily engender desperation. In the quest to prove love true, many find that it is not constant in the way they would desire. Muth may find this ironic in light of the other sonnets in which Shakespeare deals with love and its infidelity, and her standpoint is well proven by the progression of 116.


8. The concrete things that the men carry are the tools of war. Weapons and drugs, necessities for survival and medicine, letters from home and mementos from family. Some of those items are obviously used in a battle setting, and some seem less pertinent. The trinkets and mementos give the men a reason to ‘hump’ their equipment every day. These items also cause problems greater than they are able to solve because they bring emotion onto the battlefield. When Lt. Cross burns the letters from Martha, he can still see her in his mind. He blames himself for fixating on her and causing Lavender’s death, and his grief turns from genuine emotion to stoic inhumanity at the end of “The Things They Carried”. Each of the men carries similar emotions, dealt with by making light of death and avoiding real confrontation with themselves. These emotions, or lack thereof, are at the root of the Vietnam War. The concrete battle items that each soldier humps through the jungles of Vietnam symbolize the inhumanity of war and the impossibility of humanizing it, just as the repressed and humiliating emotional baggage does. Martha does not belong with Jimmy because of the kind of man he becomes. The New Testament can not cleanse the sight of Lavender falling like concrete from Kiowa’s head. The things the men carry in their hearts weigh them down just as their handguns and field rations do, and make it impossible to live in either of the worlds they straddle in their minds and hearts.

-Leslie