SONNET 116 Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Amit 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.
I love this poem. It's hopeful and desperate at the same time.
It is everything a poem should be. On the surface, it sounds like a great love story. Perhaps it is.
I'm impressed with it's ability to verbalize love and wanting, some 4000 plus years from when it was first written. Really, think about it....Think about how many thousands of lives have come and gone and how much culture has stayed the same and changed in 4000 years and yet the words still resonate a deep passionate wanting.
Meanwhile, below the surface, with even a small amount of research, tons of queastions rise to the surface.
Was Shakespeare gay?
Was this about his lover?
Was this a valient attempt at writing a poem 3rd person about a male?
If it is his personal writing, did he truly intend for his most personal work to get published?
Did this come from his personal and secret diary?
So delicious! Exactly what a poem should do.
On the surface, beautiful, eloquent, sensational; intertwining the simple and the complex.
Immediately below the surface, it leaves question, room for error, interpretation and mystery.
Ah, I love words... in all their splendor. BIG. small. ErRaTic, UnpRedictAble, woven together stories, moments frozen in time from a single 1 dimensional perspective.
I am so very grateful for our ability to articulate ourselves.
That's why I love Shakespeare. He knew the power of words. And I respect the hell out of him for that.
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