Theme: Love's Constancy
Content: An outstanding sonnet on the constancy of one person's love for another and how genuinely true love does not waver in the face of outside pressures.
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.
- “Let me not allow external factors come between us - love doesn't waver when faced with prressures to alter and bend.”
- Lines 1 and 2 are an echo of The Form of Solemnization of Marriage from "The Book of Common Prayer": "If any of you know cause, or just impediment, why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony, ye are to declare it".
- Love is the essence and present twice in this quatrain.
- Possible pun on "altar" in alters, extending the marriage metaphor.
- Evidently a cerebral relationship between the author and subject, not a physical one.
O no, it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring
barque,
Whose worth's unknown although
his height be
taken.
- “True love is an unshakeable constant, but realistically out of reach.”
- Having said what love is not in Q1, Q2 now defines what love is.
- Possible pun on "ring" in wand'ring, extending the marriage metaphor.
- Love is not present explicitly in this quatrain.
- alters and bends appear in Q1. In Q2, alters alters to although and bends bends to 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.
- “True love outlasts time itself in spite of physical beauty being diminished by time.”
- Here time, by way of its sickle, is portrayed as bending contrary to true love's unbending character in Q1.
- Love returns twice again in this quatrain which reverts to say what love is not.
- alters and bends return but with bends altering to bending.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
- “This is as true as me having written these words and that no man has ever loved - my assertion cannot be wrong.”
- Love returns once, ending the sonnet.
Critical text © NigelDavies.home@Virgin.net