An Ever-Fixed Mark
William Shakespeare in sombre mood clings to love as the only changeless thing in a world of decay.
1609
King James I 1603-1625
William Shakespeare in sombre mood clings to love as the only changeless thing in a world of decay.
1609
King James I 1603-1625
Sonnet 116 was published in 1609, when William Shakespeare was forty-five and still working as an actor in London. The capital was ravaged that year by particularly relentless outbreaks of plague, which perhaps helps to explain the sombre tone of his poem about love, the one constant in a world of sickness, age and death.
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.
‘True’ means not only ‘genuine’ but also ‘faithful, loyal’.
That is, when someone tries to take love away, love does not obey.
That is, love can act as a guide even if we do not know exactly what it is, just as a star could be used by medieval mariners to chart the path of a ship (bark or barque) through the seas even though at that time no one knew what stars were.
‘Doom’ is judgement, and hence, the Day of Judgment.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.