Sonnet 116
Shakespeare on love that does not change: let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.
At a glance
- Length, read slowly
- About a minute
- Where it goes
- Reading · Wedding ceremonyRead by: reader
Have the officiant read your choice first: they have the last word.
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.
William Shakespeare
What the poem says
Shakespeare sets out what love is by saying what it is not. It does not alter when the other person changes, and it does not bend when someone pulls at it. Then come two images from the sea: a fixed mark that stands through storms, and the star a lost ship steers by. Time cuts down youth with his sickle, but love holds out to the edge of doom. The closing couplet is a dare: if this is wrong, nobody ever loved.
When it fits
Couples pick it when they want a poem about marriage rather than a love poem to one person, and the first line names marriage outright. It fits a couple that has been together for years and a young couple making a large promise. The language is four hundred years old, so the reader needs to rehearse. If the couple prefers a poem in the first person, How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the companion piece.
Reading it aloud
A best man, a maid of honor or a parent reads it in the wedding ceremony, before the vows or after the exchange of rings. Read for the sense rather than the rhyme, and keep going until the punctuation stops you. One tip: pause before the last two lines and slow them down. Print the full sonnet in the wedding program so guests can follow the older words.
About the poet and the text
William Shakespeare's sonnets appeared in 1609 in a quarto printed in London by Thomas Thorpe. Our text follows the Yale Shakespeare edition of the sonnets, edited by Edward Bliss Reed and published by Yale University Press in 1923, which modernizes the spelling of the quarto. We took it from the Wikisource transcription.
Goes well with
- How Do I Love Thee?Barrett Browning's sonnet, spoken by one lover to the other, where Shakespeare describes love itself.
- 1 Corinthians 13: love is patient1 Corinthians 13:4-8aLove bears all things and never fails: the reading that says in scripture what the sonnet says in verse.
- Ruth 1: where you go, I will goRuth 1:16-17Whither thou goest I will go, a promise of staying that matches the sonnet's ever-fixed mark.
- Ecclesiastes 4: two are better than oneEcclesiastes 4:9-12Two are better than one, for a ceremony that pairs the sonnet with a short, practical reading.