Sunday, April 18, 2010

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

Perhaps this sonnet has become a bit cliched, but I love it all the same. Whenever I think of it, it reminds me of a part in the Jane Austen movie, Sense and Sensibility. Marianne is standing on the Palmer's hill in the rain, looking at Willoughby's mansion below and quoting it while tears and the rain are streaming down her face. I think it's my favorite part in the whole movie. It's so powerful.

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.

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