Sonnet 116 claims that true love never changes, whatever happens to the people who share it, and stakes everything the poet has written on that claim being right.
Sonnet 116: Full Poem
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.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 116 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 116 Means
Sonnet 116 is a definition of true love, built mostly out of statements about what love is not.
The first quatrain borrows the language of a wedding. The speaker says he will not accept any obstacle to the marriage of two faithful minds. Then he gives his rule: love that changes when it finds change in the other person, or pulls away when the other person pulls away, is not really love.
The second quatrain says what love is instead. It is a fixed landmark that faces storms without being shaken. It is the star that every lost ship steers by, a star whose height sailors can measure but whose true value no one can know.
The third quatrain turns to time. Time, pictured as a reaper with a curved blade, will cut down youthful beauty, the rosy lips and cheeks. But love is not time’s plaything. It does not change with time’s brief hours and weeks. It lasts all the way to the end of the world.
The couplet backs the definition with a wager. If this is wrong, and it can be proved against me, then I never wrote anything and no one has ever loved. Since he obviously did write, and people obviously have loved, the speaker is saying he cannot be wrong.
Sonnet 116 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 116 approaches its definition of love from three directions, one in each quatrain.
Love Defined by What It Is Not
The poem says more about what love is not than about what it is. Love is not the kind that changes when the other person changes, or that pulls back when the other person pulls back. By drawing the line this way, the speaker sets an absolute standard: any feeling that shifts with circumstances does not deserve the name. It is a demanding definition, and it rules out much of what people ordinarily call love.
Love as a Fixed Point
The second quatrain’s images come from navigation. A “mark” was a fixed landmark sailors used to find their position, and the star is the one lost ships steer by. These images present love as a point of reference rather than a feeling: something steady enough that others can find their way by it. Its practical use can be measured, “his height be taken,” but its full value cannot.
Love Against Time
The third quatrain gives beauty up to time without a fight. “Rosy lips and cheeks” fall within the sweep of Time’s sickle. What the poem refuses to surrender is love itself, which “bears it out even to the edge of doom.” Many of the sonnets try to save beauty from time; Sonnet 18 does it through verse. Sonnet 116 lets beauty go and claims permanence for the love instead.
Form and Language
Sonnet 116 argues like a legal case and speaks in the language of weddings, the sea and the law courts.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Lines 6 and 8 rhyme on two-syllable words, “shaken” and “taken.” The couplet’s rhyme, “proved” and “loved,” may have been closer in sound in Shakespeare’s day than it is now.
The Wedding Service
“Admit impediments” echoes the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer, which charges the couple to confess any “impediment” to their marriage. The speaker applies that ceremony to a “marriage of true minds,” a union of faithful spirits rather than a legal wedding, and declares that he will allow no objection to it.
A Poem Built on Negatives
“Not,” “no” and “never” appear eight times in fourteen lines, and the last line adds a “nor.” The poem defines love by piling up denials: it does not alter, does not bend, is never shaken, is not Time’s fool. Even the double negative of the final line, “I never writ, nor no man ever loved,” which was acceptable English in Shakespeare’s time, adds weight rather than cancelling out.
Repeated Words
Shakespeare repeats words in changed forms, a device called polyptoton: “love is not love,” “alters” and “alteration,” “remover” and “remove.” The repetitions test each word against itself. The question the poem asks is which kind of love is love, and the doubled words make that question audible.
“Time’s Fool”
A “fool” here is a dupe or plaything, something at the mercy of another’s whims. Time is pictured as a reaper with a “bending sickle,” and “compass” means the range of its sweep. The line concedes that time will cut down beauty and insists that love is not among the things it can mock.
A Closer Reading
The most famous love poem at weddings never addresses a lover, and its definition of love is designed to survive the lover leaving.
Sonnet 116 contains no “you” and no “thou.” It speaks to no one and describes no one. There are no eyes, no voice, no face, apart from the “rosy lips and cheeks” that it hands over to Time. For a poem so often read aloud to a couple, it is strikingly impersonal. It does not describe a feeling for a person; it describes a rule.
Look at what the rule anticipates. Love does not alter “when it alteration finds,” when the other person changes. It does not bend “with the remover to remove,” when the other person withdraws. Both conditions describe the beloved failing. The poem imagines the other party changing and leaving, and defines true love as the thing that remains fixed when that happens. The navigational images fit this exactly. A star or a seamark does not move toward the ship; it stays where it is, whether or not anyone steers by it.
That is why the couplet’s wager is safe. If love is defined as something that does not depend on the beloved, no behavior by the beloved can disprove it. And the conditions the speaker sets for being wrong, that he “never writ” and “no man ever loved,” are plainly false, so the wager can never be called. The poem has built a claim about love that nothing outside it can touch.
The sonnets around it show why that might matter. The next poem, Sonnet 117, opens with the speaker imagining himself accused of having neglected the young man, “Accuse me thus, that I have scanted all.” Read in sequence, Sonnet 116 is not only a serene truth about love. It is also a position the speaker needs to hold, a definition strong enough to survive changes on either side of the relationship.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 116, answered briefly.
Why Is Sonnet 116 Read at Weddings?
Its opening echoes the marriage service, and its subject is a love that does not change over a lifetime. That makes it a natural fit for a ceremony about lasting commitment, even though the poem itself is not addressed to a couple.
Who Is Sonnet 116 Addressed To?
No one directly. It sits among the Fair Youth sonnets, but it never says “you” or “thou.” It is a general statement about the nature of love.
What Does “The Star to Every Wandering Bark” Mean?
The guiding star for every ship that has lost its way. Sailors measured a star’s height above the horizon to work out their position, so love is pictured as a fixed point to navigate by.
What Does “Love’s Not Time’s Fool” Mean?
Love is not at the mercy of time. Time can destroy youthful beauty, but it cannot make a fool of true love or change it.
What Does the Couplet Mean?
If what I have said is wrong and can be proved so, then I never wrote anything and no one has ever loved. Since both are obviously untrue, the speaker is saying his definition must be right.
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets set other kinds of permanence, and other kinds of love, against Sonnet 116.