Sonnet 116

Constancy and the Muse

1 Let me not to the marriage of true minds
2 Admit impediments. Love is not love
3 Which alters when it alteration finds,
4 Or bends with the remover to remove:
5 O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
6 That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
7 It is the star to every wandering bark,
8 Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
9 Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
10 Within his bending sickle's compass come;
11 Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
12 But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
13 If this be error and upon me prov'd,
14 I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Notes

TLN 1612cultural context
“marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”
The opening lines quote and then refuse the legal formula from the Church of England marriage service, which required any witness who knew 'cause or just impediment' why a couple should not marry to say so. The poet applies the ceremony to the joining of two minds and insists no such bar can apply.
historical The sonnet form
TLN 1614rhetorical device
“alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove”
These two lines give the negative definition — what love is not — before the poet states what it is. Repeating a root word in changed grammatical form ('alters'/'alteration', 'remover'/'remove') was a recognised figure called polyptoton, and it makes the argument feel ironclad: love that changes with change, or departs with the one who departs, is by its own logic not love.
TLN 1616archaic vocab
“ever-fixed mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken”
A 'mark' here is a fixed navigational landmark — a coastal headland, tower, or church spire that sailors steered by. Unlike a ship tossed in a storm, the mark stands unmoved. Love, the poet argues, is just such a fixed reference point: storms may rage around it, but it does not waver.
TLN 1620cultural context
“rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle's compass come”
Time was pictured as a figure carrying a sickle or scythe — the same curved blade a farmer uses to cut grain at harvest. 'Bending' is both the curve of the blade and the arc of its swing; 'compass' means the sweep or range of that arc. Rosy lips and cheeks — the standard blazon attributes of youth and beauty — fall within Time's harvest. Love, the poet insists, does not.
TLN 1623archaic vocab
“even to the edge of doom”
'Doom' here means the Last Judgment — God's final sentence at the end of the world, not mere ruin or disaster. 'The edge of doom' is the very last moment of created time, the boundary before eternity begins. Love endures not just for a lifetime but to that ultimate instant.