Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago

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Sonnet 116 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. This sonnet attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and is not.

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.

Music : Laendler in C Minor Hess 68 | Kevin MacLeod