One of my favorite poems

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.

William Shakespeare’s poem “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” express his true attitude towards “love”. This is a closed form poem known has a heroic couplet because it contains fourteen iambic lines with a couplet at the end. The couplet at the end is the two lines that sum up the gist of the poem. Shakespeare begins with describing what true love shouldn’t be like, and then what it really is like. Nevertheless, in the end he states his strong belief in his theory of love.

He starts the poem by stating, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments; love is not love”, which means that he doesn’t want to be an obstacle or a discouragement for those who plan on marrying, yet he wants to state his opinion on what true love is. In the third and fourth line, he states what true love should not be, “Which alters when it alteration finds/ Or bends with the remover to remove”. In other words, “love is not love” if one finds someone else attractive and has an affair with that person or has constant issues with each other and resorts to divorce. However, the fifth line is a marker because here the poem switches direction and aims at what true love should be, “O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark”. Shakespeare describes love as an “ever-fixed mark” like a lighthouse in the middle of the sea. He also uses imagery to illustrate that love cannot even be “shaken” by a tempest, which is a violent windstorm. In the next line, “It is a star to every wand’ring bark,” is interesting, because before the invention of the compass, sailors usually used the North Star as an indication of their direction or location in the sea. If they found the north star, then it would mean that they are no longer lost. This is similar to the idea Shakespeare is conveying here, which means that if one found the “star” or one’s true love, then one found oneself and is no longer lost. Line eight talks about how people easily say that they are in love but don’t really know the true meaning of it; thus, it has great “height” but no one knows it’s “worth”. This poem interests me because I was intrigued by the way Shakespeare described love. He did it in a manner that ordinary people can understand. His use of metaphor and imagery further embellished the poem because it created a feel for the message he is truly trying to convey. I was able to break each line down individually and understand the meaning of it. In general, this poem was one of the most interesting poems that Shakespeare has written.