Name: Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 Is Not What It Seems
Uploaded: 2026-01-25T17:12:58.000Z
Duration: 8 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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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.

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

If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

That was sonnet number 116 by Shakespeare.

It's his most famous sonnet, which probably makes it the most famous sonnet in history.

Typical of the form, the subject here is romantic love, and

it follows the typical metrical pattern as well.

14 lines of iambic pentameter, 3 quatrains, then a couplet with the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEFGG.

The poem has a pristine surface, and reading it, hearing it, you can grasp its theme with ease.

True love's permanence in a world that's impermanent.

It's the kind of poem you might hear somebody read at a wedding or quote in a movie.

Sonnet 116 is carefully designed to give you the impression that you understand what it's saying.

this sonnet proves to be much more slippery and strange than it initially seems.

The sonnet begins with a somewhat curious Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.

It could mean that he'll protect a marriage of two minds from the impediments that seek to destroy it.

It could mean that he refuses to acknowledge impediments.

Or it could mean that he won't confess to impediments even if he knows some.

The ambiguity is unsettling, and that feeling is immediately augmented by the second half of line two.

Love is not love, which is contradictory and really meaningless.

Of course, this is only the beginning of a full sentence, but

where a poet puts his line breaks is always significant.

The second sentence begins a definition of love, which is the central aim of the poem.

But it does this not by saying what love is, but what it's not.

Love is not something that changes when it confronts changes either in the lover or the world.

It's not something that leaves even when a lover does.

But notice that I'm paraphrasing here, which is something that the sonnet is forcing me to do.

I just mentioned the lovers and the world.

But these things are conspicuously absent from the poem, which is one of its oddest qualities.

Sonnets are often written for someone, to someone, a beloved.

But there is no one here, no one but the speaker.

As Jane Roessner points out, the first quatrain is entirely, radically abstract.

In the second quatrain we move from negative to positive definitions, getting a little more concrete, but

The mark may be a sea mark, a beacon anchored in or near the water to aid navigation, like stars aid navigation to sailors in their ships, their wandering barks.

A star may be a guide, but it's also distant and remote, unreachable.

What good is this ideal of changeless love to real people who are destined to change, to wander, to fail, to grow?

In the third quatrain, Shakespeare descends further, and we catch our first glimpse of a human being here.

The rosy lips and cheeks of youth that fade in time.

Who else do we know who carries one of those?

It's a somewhat gruesome image that's a little too easy to picture.

For a poem that promised not to admit impediments, it seems like we're running into them at every turn.

In fact, Sonnet 116 is invaded by negatives like weeds sprouting in a flower bed.

If he's wrong about love, well, then he's never written a word, and no one has ever loved.

since we've just been reading words he's written, we're supposed to conclude that he can't be wrong.

But it's a paradoxical way to put it, because if he is in error, a possibility he seems to acknowledge, well, that would negate the very ideal of love itself, taking the poem along with it into oblivion.

In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare constantly undermines the easy assumptions we make about it.

We're not hearing a love poem for someone.

We're not even hearing a poem about the supposed permanence of love.

We're hearing a speaker in a void trying to convince himself that love is somehow different than every other thing in the ephemeral universe, and

You get the sense of someone closing their eyes really hard, refusing to admit a truth that permeates the sonnet, despite itself, that love is as erratic and fluid and volatile as the people who feel it.

This doesn't mean that true love, the marriage of true minds, is any less real or any less beautiful.

It's the opposite, in fact, something Shakespeare knew very well.

Beauty belongs to what's impermanent, and we cherish the most the things we can lose.

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