Sonnet 116 - I Want to Know What Love Is

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.

  Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 is part of the Fair Youth sequence addressed to an anonymous young man. This sonnet does not mention its recipient, instead focusing on a general theme of the nature of love. This theme is divided into four themes, one for each quatrain and the couplet. Quatrain 1 is a list of things love will not do, quatrain 2 uses nautical imagery to describe the constancy of love, and quatrain 3 is on the passage of time. The couplet finishes the sonnet with a challenge to the reader to prove the author wrong in his assessment. All of these reticulate and refer back to each other.
Quatrain 1 begins this study of what love is with a list of the things that should not happen with love. “Let me not the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” (116.1-2) is a direct reference to legal barriers to marriage but can be taken in a more general sense to mean an obstacle. “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (116.2-3), meaning love does not try to change the perceived faults of the person who is loved. If it does, then it is not love. It also does not bend “with the remover to remove.” The other will still be loved through hardship and will not be changed by the remover, time (116.4). Time’s role in love will be expanded upon in quatrain 3.

 Quatrain 2’s description of love’s characteristics employs nautical imagery. It is “an ever-fixed mark” (116.5), bringing to mind a landmark such as a lighthouse or some other stationary landmark to guide sailors even during storms. Likewise, love is constant, even in the face of figurative “tempests” (116.6), and like the stars used to navigate, love is the “start to every wand’ring bark. It can be measured, like the stars, but its true value is “unknown” (116.7-8).

 Quatrain 3 expands upon love against the “remover” time as mentioned in line 4. “Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come” (116.9-10). The physical world, especially the human body is under the control of time, but as said in the first quatrain love does not “bend” or change with time. The “compass” in line 10 is both a description of the scythe carried by Time personified and a callback to the nautical navigational imagery of the previous quatrain. Another callback occurs in line 11, “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks” (116.11)  returning to lines 2 and 3 in the first quatrain, “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (116.2-3). Ultimately, love lasts to “the edge of doom”-- doomsday, or the end of time (116.12).

 The ending couplet is a challenge to the reader to in turn challenge the poet. “If this be error and upon me proved / I never write, nor no man ever loved” (116.13-14). If he is wrong in his description of love, then he has never written anything and love is not real, just as he said in lines 1 and 2 to not let him “admit impediments” to the “marriage of true minds.” His claim that if he is in error he has never written is bold, especially considering the previous 115 sonnets he has just written to a fair youth.