Sonnet 116

To view more poems I have examined, click HERE.

SONNET 116

by William Shakespeare

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-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering 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.

______________________

Shakespeare’s famous sonnet is 14 lines, in iambic pentameter, with three quatrains containing ABAB, CDCD, EFEF rhyme scheme, followed by a couplet with a GG rhyme scheme.

Sonnet 116 is about the nature of love and it begins with a famous line:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments;

The Bard here states opposition to the entry of impediments (anything that might get in the way) of the marriage of true minds (i.e. love.) As this poem is believed to be written to “the fair youth” some believe that Shakespeare is expressing here a desire that nothing should stand between them and their love for one another. He continues on in the later half of line two, through lines three and four, with another thought:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

Here the Speaker tells us that love is constant. In fact, he says that love is not love at all if it changes with circumstance. The gist of this line is that love is unalterable and lasts forever.

Lines 5 and 6:

O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

The speaker emphasizes the previous point here, describing love as a thing that is immovable.

Lines 7 and 8:

It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

The Speaker here gives us an examples of a “fixed mark” to complete the comparison – a star. A “wandering bark” here is a ship, which charts its course on the basis of the stars – or at least they did so at the time of the Sonnet. The meaning of line 8 is somewhat confusing, though I believe the poet is saying that love’s value “unknown” and unknowable, even if you attempt to measure it.

Lines 9 through 12:

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.

The third quatrain begins a new thought, though it echoes in the first quatrain in the sense that it tells us again what love is not.

By capitalizing Time, Shakespeare is personifying it. With the reference to a bending sickle in Line 10, it appears that the personified Time is Death.

The Speaker says that even though the body is altered by the passage of time, with rosy lips eventually aging and dying, love does not alter. The Speaker says in Line 12 that love endures right up to the edge of doom (i.e. death.)

The sonnet ends in an interesting way.

Lines 13 and 14:

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The Speaker lays down a gauntlet of challenge to his readers, saying that if he is ever proven wrong on this point, that he has never written anything of value and also that no person has ever actually loved. It’s very self-assured in a grim and forceful way. I really love the couplet though, and have decided I should attach something along those lines to my own writing.

Here is a recitation of this sonnet by Loki actor, Tom Hiddleston.