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.
Originally published in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) by William Shakespeare. Public domain.
Analysis
“Sonnet 116” offers Shakespeare’s most concise philosophy of love: constancy despite time and change. The sonnet’s logical progression — definition, images, and oath — fuses feeling with argument.
Love is “an ever‑fixed mark,” a navigational star whose value cannot be measured yet reliably guides. The volta arrives less as reversal than intensification: love refuses the scythe of Time; it “bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
The final couplet gambles the poet’s very authorship on the truth of his claim.
Form and Sound
An English sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) in iambic pentameter, it achieves music through balanced antitheses — “alters / alteration,” “remover / remove” — and through the clean hinge from metaphor (compass, star) to metaphysics. The diction’s simplicity belies its precision: maritime and astronomical images anchor abstract claims in the world’s stable measures.
Theme
Love here is ethical rather than erotic: a steadfastness tested by time. The poem’s power lies in its quiet absolutes — not the fervor of passion, but the discipline of fidelity.