This Shakespeare Sonnet crossed my path a couple of times this last week. It struck me as never before. In my high school and college days, Shakespeare was very difficult for me to understand. Maybe these words are falling on new (or should I say old) ears now that I have a little more life experience than I did 25 years ago. I aspire to long term love that makes its way through “tempests.”
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.
