by Michelle Sayles


"Let me not to the marriage of true minds" struck me like someone standing on a soapbox screaming out his beliefs. Shakespeare is making a declaration of his thoughts on love, and I happen to agree with him. Love cannot be shaken by adversity nor changed by time. True love is constant: “it is an ever-fixed mark”.

Though this poem is short in length it is full of emotion.  Shakespeare makes it known in the first line that he will not come between two people who are in love. He believes that love is strong enough to endure temptation and not waver. If love is altered by another, a “remover” of love, it was not love.

Time is love’s most powerful adversary, and this is demonstrated by the capitalization of the word making it a living breathing enemy of love. However powerful Time is, Shakespeare is certain that love is still stronger. “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks/ Within his bending sickle’s compass come.” The reference to the sickle shows just how much of a threat Shakespeare views Time. Like Death, Time too carries his sickle waiting to steal love that is based on the loveliness of youth. But of course true love cannot be fooled by Time. Love cannot be measured in “brief hours and weeks”; love is eternal; it “bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

The structure of the poem lends to the fluidity. There is a primary rhyme that is dominant with stronger rhyming and a secondary that has weaker rhymes but is still powerful in meaning. Out of alignment with the other lines, but still included in the single stanza, is Shakespeare’s final declaration. If what he has stated is proven to be wrong he “never writ, nor no man ever loved.” Since we know, of
course, that Shakespeare has written and that men have loved, Shakespeare's hypothesis about love must be true—it is constant.