I posted this poem on this blog last February, but I really felt like posting it again. It’s one of my favorite Shakespeare sonnets. Over the years I have had several friends who dealt with relationship and marital problems, and sometimes it seemed that what it came down to was that their relationships were based on lust. They were only really physically attracted to each other, and that was all. At the first sign of trouble, these relationships became severally damaged or collapsed. Love is something much, much deeper than that. This sonnet says it all.
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, Sonnet 116
