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Shakespeare's Sonnets - Sonnet 116
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Last updated: Fri, Jul 31, 2015
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Shakespeare's Sonnets - Sonnet 116Sonnet 116
116
Synopsis:
The poet here meditates on what he sees as the truest and strongest kind of love, that between minds. He defines such a union as unalterable and eternal.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
4Or 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,
8Whose 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,
12But 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.