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
Which 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, for 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.
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A few notes:
The theme of sea travel, wandering, navigation and course-altering carries all through this sonnet. Were Shakespeare and the subject threatened with separation by a very large impediment, an ocean? Or something less substantial?
Clever:
A “bend” is a knot used by sailors, even though it here means turn.
“Compass” can be a navigational instrument, even though it here means boundary.
The word “error” has an original meaning of being off-course, even though here it means mistake.
The first edition of the Sonnets contains just a few outright errors, and I have a personal notion that the third-from-last line might originally have read: “bears on even,” meaning travels in a straight line on the same compass bearing. This would also scan more smoothly; whether that is a good thing or not, matter of opinion; what do you think?
UPDATE: Speaking of outright errors, in the first 1609 edition this sonnet was incorrectly numbered 119; in the diary title, I repeated the error, but have now corrected it. Thanks to Peregrine Kate.
Coincidentally, this diary was under construction when DKos member The Lipsticked Pig mentioned it last Tuesday: www.dailykos.com/… Harmonic convergence?
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(((((Willam Shakespeare, 1564-1616)))))
Note: From earlier today, please note another poetry diary: "There's courage involved if you want to become truth" by Rumi (courtesy of rflctammt)
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“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” -- T.S. Eliot