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 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.
The Shakespeare of the sonnets is a very different person from the
playwright who gave us King Lear, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's
Dream. In the plays he is the consummate craftsman, entertaining
audiences with masterpieces of dramatic effect while exploring human
character to a degree seen never before or since. The sonnets, though,
reveal a more thoughtful, introspective writer, a philosopher-poet
inquiring, especially, into the question of Time and its effect on human
affairs. But he's never coldly intellectual; his sonnets burn with
emotion and (unrequited?) love. And it's in this respect that I feel
that Shakespeare's sonnets are the definitive statement of the
metaphysical poet's art: he presages Donne and Marvell and their
'passionate intelligence' with remarkable accuracy.
'Let me not to the marriage of true minds' is about as metaphysical as a
poem can get; indeed, if I didn't know better, I would have credited it
to Donne. Its themes are the usual Shakespearean preoccupations: in his
commentary to 'Full many a glorious morning have I seen' [2], Martin
writes, "If you've read any of Shakespeare's sonnets, the sequence of
images is instantly familiar. Time triumphs over flesh, and Love over
all.".
This is the central idea of today's poem as well, but whereas in the
previous sonnet Shakespeare talks about the frailty of the flesh, here
he is more concerned with the constancy of Love.
Love (the 'marriage of true minds') does not weaken when the
circumstances that gave rise to it are changed - 'Love is not love /
Which alters when it alteration finds'. Nay, it is a constant, like a
star that glimmers fixed in the sky, far above the tempests that batter
the wandering bark [3]. And the navigator of life's ship can measure a
star's height to obtain a reading of his own position; thus the star
(Love) acts both as a symbol of constancy and as a beacon, guiding the
voyager onwards.
Nor is Love at the mercy of Time; although the external manifestations
of beauty ('rosy lips and cheeks') may fall within the arc of the Grim
Reaper's sickle, Love itself does not decay or crumble with the passage
of hours and weeks.