90.9 Cape Girardeau | 88.9-HD Ste. Genevieve | 88.7 Poplar Bluff
National Poetry Month Celebration

"Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds" by William Shakespeare

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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 ever 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 prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Dr. Robert Hamblin is Emeritus Professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University.