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:
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.
This sonnet consists on the defence of true love. The meaning of true love is described as an ever-fixed mark, something, a feeling that nothing can destroy. The first quatrain describes true love as unmoral and unchanging. True love can not be changed by its own nor allows itself to be changed even though the person who is loved changes. Shakespeare explains his thoughts on love. He defines true love as constant, an “ever-fixed mark”. If love is altered and shaken, it was never true love, since he explains that true love will never be shaken as if it was something that we couldn’t reach and touch, if we are able to reach it, it was never high enough and therefore never true love. In the second quatrain true love is compared to a star which guides people as if people where lost and could be all guided to the same place by this unreachable star. This star is described as unnatural and indescribable, something unknown although we seek it and feel it, we never reach it if it is really true. If this star disappears that means that it was never real, it was just an illusion: true love will never disappear. In Shakespeare’s time, science of stars had still not very much progressed, therefore he uses it as an example of something which we know nothing about, love is a mystery that we can feel and see but we know nothing about. This metaphor emphasises the constancy and mystery of love.
