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 prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Among Shakespeare’s most famous and enduring sonnets, we find this gem, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” In these 14 lines of iambic pentameter, Shakespeare offers profound reflections on the true nature of love, particularly in its relation to time and change.
I was fortunate enough to first encounter this poem in a class on English poetry taught by my father, who drew my classmates and me to appreciate the nobility of the speaker’s mind and heart, as expressed in this poem. He contrasted the idea of love presented in Sonnet 116 with another poem we had read around the same time, John Donne’s “The Good-Morrow.”
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then? ...
If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee. ...
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; Where can we find two better hemispheres, Without sharp north, without declining west? Whatever dies, was not mixed equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
Notice that, in this framework of love, each lover must give of himself or herself to the same degree: The love must be “mixed equally,” or else it risks dying. The tension introduced in the final line is that if one lover draws back, gives less than is received, the entire relationship may fall to pieces.In contrast, the notion of love enshrined in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 is one of total stability. The lover in this sonnet looks outward, to the good of the beloved, with far less consideration of how “equal” the relationship may be than what we find expressed in Donne’s poem.
Constancy Is the Key
In this opening, Shakespeare, being the expert craftsman that he is, uses technique and sounds that reflect the meanings they convey. For example, the enjambment of line 2–3 creates a pause after “Love is not love” but before “which alters.” This break in the middle of the sentence disrupts its flow and harmony, just as an unexpected change in the beloved could disrupt the harmony of the relationship. The following line, line 4, is end-stopped, however, so it flows more smoothly, perhaps suggesting the constancy of the lover overcoming change.
The Fixed Point
Of course, if a person can go on loving and caring for someone even when that love is not returned in equal measure, then surely one may endure all other types of catastrophes. After the opening quatrain, Shakespeare moves on to imagery borrowed from sailing and navigation to develop this idea of the solidity of true love in the face of all that the world might throw at it. The mind of the poet flows easily from the idea of some “fixed mark,” perhaps a cliff or promontory, unshaken by tempestuous waves, to the metaphor of a star fixed in the heavens that guides ships (“wandering barks”) to safe havens.
The necessity of using the stars, especially the North star, and “taking its height” with navigation instruments for steering at sea would have been well known to Shakespeare. True love is thus an unchanging beacon of light that guides us through the vicissitudes of life—war, bankruptcy, illness, whatever it may be.
Subtly suggested by the use of maritime language is the idea that life has a destination, a purpose, and we are like ships at sea, and the map or guiding star to this journey is true love—love that includes but transcends mere emotion. This love resides primarily in the mind and the will.
Immutability
A new variation on the theme appears in the third quatrain, which turns to address the ultimate source of change and uncertainty, time itself. In this sublunary sphere we inhabit, Plato and Aristotle’s realm of change and mutability, we are under time’s dominion, and ever suffer under the uncertainties of his rule.
Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets interrogate this problem of time, and whether anything human can truly last. What is the answer to the tyranny of time? In this sonnet, the speaker asserts that one thing, at least, can last. “Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come” (line 9–10). In other words, love will not be mocked or belittled by time, though everything else, including physical and external beauty, is cut down in the end, by time’s scythe, an image which recalls the Grim Reaper.
This quatrain, like most of the poem, builds its argument on negations, perhaps because something as mysterious as love is easier described by what it isn’t than what it is: Love is not like our bodies, subject to time. And in making this observation, the speaker also hints that a love based only on the body, or physical attraction, cannot stand the test of time.
Our bodies constantly remind us of the passage of hours, weeks, years. Wrinkles develop. Hair thins. The once smooth and blooming skin becomes rough and drained. And if our love is rooted only in appearance, it, too, will wither and die. In his play “Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare has Duke Orsino lament, “For women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.” Orsino—because of his shallow idea of love—also warns Caesario that his love won’t last if he marries a woman older than himself whose beauty is fading.
But not so in the case of true love, cries the poet in this sonnet, summoning a kind of challenge to be tossed in the face of the juggernaut of time. For a moment, the poet stops describing love by what it isn’t, throws down the gauntlet, and in lines 11–12 proclaims, like a clarion trumpet call, “Love ... bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
The term “doom” here refers especially to Doomsday, the day of judgement, the end of time, already suggested by the connotations of the Grim Reaper earlier. In effect, then, the poet claims that one thing—and perhaps one thing only—will outlast time itself, and that is true love.
