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William Shakespeare, Sonnets, 1609
In 1609 a sequence of 154 sonnets was published under Shakespeare's name. Some are addressed to a young man, some to a woman, and nobody agrees about who.
Sonnet 116 is addressed to neither. It names no person.
It is not a confession. It is a definition.
The speaker is not saying I love you. He is saying what love is, and more precisely what it is not.
It is not something that changes when it finds a reason to change. It is not something that bends when the other person walks away.
It is not subject to time. The entire poem is built as a refusal, fourteen lines of no, and he stakes everything he has ever written on the last two.
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.
Look at the second line.
"Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds," He did not say when it is betrayed, or forgotten, or when twenty years have passed.
He said when it alteration finds. When anything changes.
The job, the body, the city, the other person's mind.
If it changes because something changed, it was never love.
Now listen to me. You have been told, in a hundred different tones of voice, that what you feel has a shelf life.
That there is an appropriate window for it. After the window it becomes something else: embarrassing, then foolish, then something to manage.
"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come;"
He knew. He put it right there in the poem, the sickle, the cheeks, the lips going.
He did not pretend time does not touch you. He said love is not under the same clock.
Time takes the skin. It does not get the feeling.
"Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom."
Bears it out. Not endures sweetly, not waits with grace.
Bears it out, the way you carry something heavy across a distance that does not end and do not put it down. Anyone who has carried a feeling past the point where she was told to set it down knows what those words mean.
This was written over four hundred years ago by a man who already knew the argument. That love expires.
That past a certain point it is foolish to keep holding it. He wrote fourteen lines against that and staked everything on the final couplet.
"If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
He bet his entire body of work. Everything he ever put on paper, against the possibility that he was wrong about this.
The poem is free. It has been free for four centuries and almost nobody alive has it by heart.
Underneath it I wrote
It has not expired. I have not put it down.
Today. Copy the sonnet out by hand, all fourteen lines. When you reach the final couplet, slow down. Then write one line underneath, not about the poem, about whatever you are still carrying.
What I wrote that year
In January of the year I could not write, I copied a stanza of Keats into the notebook. Underneath it I put one word. "Still." I sat there for a long time. I did not know if I meant the poem was still true or if I meant I was still here. Six weeks later I wrote a second word underneath a sentence of Tolstoy, and that one I have not shown anyone.
