“If that be sin which in fix’d hearts doth breed / A loathing of all loose unchastity”

For Poetry Monday:


Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

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 prov’d,
    I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.


Yes, I know it's not as good a poem as, say, "That time of year thou mayst in me behold," but this was the first poem I ever memorized and I still love it as an ever-fixed mark.

---L.

Subject quote from Sonnet XIV from "Astrophil and Stella," Philip Sidney.