Sonnet 116: Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds

What Shakespeare and Jane Austen Share in Common

[Ivan Aivazovsky, Stormy Sea at Night, 1849: http://ivan.evart.ru/jivopis/storm/pictures/storm_in_night]

Of all Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sonnet 116 one might be the most personal for me:

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-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring 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.¹

My first memory of reading this is of reading it in college. I was an English major, so of course I was studying Shakespeare. But I also got married in the middle of my sophomore year of college. I would have read this either just before or shortly after being married – so young, so in love. (We are, by the way, still very much in love.)

A story for another day is how when I read Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert around the same time, my worldview was radically transformed from Romanticism to Realism. (Actually, I write about that journey in a chapter of my memoir, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me.) But for this essay, on this day, I will say that this sonnet helped me—as a very young newlywed filled with passions and emotions, but also in possession of a critical mind yearning for the life of reason and the intellect—to view love and marriage as something far more than a flash in the pan of emotion.

This sonnet speaks to the way in which like-mindedness—not merely inflamed passions and desires—serves as a strong foundation for love (and marriage). In fact, one of the things I have counseled young people about over the years is that among the qualities they should seek in a marriage partner is shared values. Values manifest in a person’s character. And character is something measured by the mind, by truth, not merely emotions.

Now note, the poem’s subject matter includes actual, literal marriage—but it is not limited to that. The sonnet is about “a marriage of minds,” after all, a phrase which uses marriage as a metaphor. Moreover, since this sonnet is within the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets that are addressed to the “fair youth,” this likely isn’t primarily about a church wedding, though its wisdom, I think, certainly applies.

Speaking of literal marriage, Shakespeare chooses to draw from the language of the Book of Common Prayer in opening the poem. This phrasing (and its source) would have been as immediately recognizable to Shakespeare’s audience as “Make America Great Again” (again, the phrase and the source) is to us today:

And also speaking to the persons that shall be married, he shall say:

I REQUIRE and charge you (as you will answer at the dreadful Day of Judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed) that if either of you do know any impediment why you may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, that you confess it. For be you well assured that so many as be coupled together otherwise than God's word doth allow are not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful.

Shakespeare begins the sonnet, then, upon the understanding of marriage as expressed by the Established church. But this isn’t a poem about any marriage, or even any lawful marriage blessed by the Church of England. It is, more particularly, as I noted above, a poem about a marriage between two minds, a marriage made compatible by the dictates of reason and sense.

Speaking of sense, another way this sonnet has become meaningful in my life is through its appearance in one of my favorite film adaptations of one of my favorite novels: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. If you aren’t familiar with the story (which you should be, and I will be so bold as to recommend my own annotated edition for your reading pleasure), let me explain that the title phrase reflects the opposite characters of the two sisters in the novel, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Elinor is all “sense” (ruled by reason), and Marianne is all “sensibility” (ruled by passion). The arc of the story is one in which they each learn to temper their natural inclinations in order to become more balanced. In Austen’s (correct) understanding, virtuous character clings to neither extreme but balances both parts of our human nature—the rational and the emotional.

In Ang Lee’s sumptuous 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, the sonnet appears twice. It isn’t mentioned in the text of the novel, but the film’s addition of it faithfully and powerfully reflects Marianne’s character as developed in the text. (So I approve of this particular deviation from the source material.) You can see snippets of these two scenes in this video clip to get the idea. I really do hope it tempts you to read the novel and watch the film!

Although separated by centuries, both Shakespeare and Austen lived in a culture in which the merits and roles of reason and passion were discussed and debated. This was for a number of reasons, but perhaps it’s most helpful simply to consider that each of them lived on either side of the Enlightenment, that point at which reason and rationalism for a time reigned supreme, but sometimes at the expense of other essential aspects of our humanity (like emotion). Both Shakespeare and Austen recognized a need for balance.

And this is what Sonnet 116 does so beautifully and memorably: it addresses romantic, sexual, passionate love in a way that reminds us how rooted in reason, unchanging truth, and eternity such love can (and should) be.

Such love does not alter because the world or circumstances alter. (Again, we are reminded of the Book of Common Prayer: “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health.”)

Such love does not “go with the flow” of all that might flow against it.

Such love is the ever-fixed and priceless North Star that lives above earth’s storms and by which a lost boat (or “bark”) can reliably find its way.

Such love acknowledges the “tempests” – lives in them, even, and yet knows that something greater and more eternal exists outside and above such passing storms.

Such love does not fade or disappear with time, the way the beauty of a face does.

Such love “bears it out” (note the allusion to the biblical definition of love, which 1 Corinthians 13:7 says “bears all things”) until the end of earthly time.

With this sonnet, we get in the final couplet not a turn or contradiction as we’ve seen most often before, but rather a true emphasis, indeed, a proof. The only way the argument laid out here will be proven wrong, the poet says, is if it be proved that he never wrote, nor any man ever loved. Now, perhaps someone could show through some semantic sleight of hand that no man ever loved. But as to the first proof: we are reading these lines, and that fact refutes the possibility that the writer of these lines did not write.

And it is this final logic of the poem that makes me see this poem as offering a more (but not exclusively) rational approach to love than a romantic one (Marianne Dashwood notwithstanding). Yes, on one reading, we might say that you can’t get a more romantic or starrry-eyed view of love than one that says, essentially, true love is eternal, never changing, yada, yada, yada. There’s hardly a more stereotypical stereotype than that.

But I think that what this sonnet does is take that romantic notion and show—through the elegant, structured, almost mathematical form of the sonnet as only Shakespeare could render it—how tied to reason and eternal truth true love is. It’s a poem that makes an argument about love.

True love is not just of the heart—it is of the mind as well.²

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Next sonnets: 130 and 138.

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"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil³

1. Here’s a lovely reading of the sonnet by Sir Patrick Stewart:

2. “Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’.” — Matthew 22:37

3. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.