This week’s poem is chosen to mark what would have been our 21st wedding anniversary. It’s Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
William Shakespeare (1564—1616)
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
Poem 317. Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
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.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
This is one of Shakespeare’s better known love sonnets.
In the first stanza, Shakespeare asserts that anything other than a “marriage of true minds” cannot be love; nor can love persist when “it alteration finds”—if the other person’s affection falters, one’s own must surely dwindle, he argues, and if the other should move (or remove) to a distance, true love remains unweakened.
The second stanza reinforces the idea of true love as a marker, a polar star that guides sailors (bark or barque is an archaic term for a sailing ship) on their voyages through the severest storms—every vessel may steer by this star, no matter their worth, apparent or real.
The third stanza reminds us that real love stands the test of time, lasting to the end of our lives regardless of the march of the hours, and despite time’s hold over our good looks.
The final couplet declares Shakespeare’s firm belief in his words by venturing that if his words can be proved wrong, he could never have written them, nor could any man have ever felt true love.
I like it because it describes beautifully the power of true love.