Sonnet 116

When I was seventeen, I fell in love with Shakespeare's Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.


I adored that poem. I wrote it on a piece of paper, and then I typed it onto another piece of paper, and I carried it with me, and I learnt it by heart; I read it aloud in the bath, and I said it under my breath on trains and I doodled lines from it on my hand during maths class. I even, in later years, drunkenly recited it on a first date to a boy I liked very much, and then - predictably - never saw him again (although he was very impressed, he said, with my intonation and the way I emotionally clutched my fist in a ball by my heart throughout).

For a girl who grew up reading and rereading Wuthering Heights - who stole Pride and Prejudice from the school library when she was 11 and never gave it back (and this was before Colin Firth rendered it quite an attractive read) - this poem told me everything there was to tell: it summarised nearly two decades of reading (or what I had kept with me from two decades of reading, which is the same thing), neatly and succinctly. Love, I knew, finally, did not bend with the remover to remove. O, no (no!) it was an ever fixed mark, that looked on tempests and was never shaken; it was the star to every wandering bark, whose worth was unknown although his height be taken. It was not time's fool - which everybody else seemed to be - although its rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass came, and love altered not with his brief hours and weeks, but beared it out: even to the edge of doom.

It was all I needed to know. All, I thought, anybody needed to know. I didn't know quite what the edge of doom was, and I didn't know what a wandering bark was, and I certainly didn't know what a sickle's compass was, but I knew what it meant to never be shaken, and to never be altered, and to never be removed. I knew that it meant simply: that I might change, and I might fade, and I might alter and weaken and fail, but love - when it found me, which of course it would because it found everybody, just as death and taxes did - would not. Because otherwise it was not love.

I'm not seventeen anymore, and another ten years of reading has done nothing to prepare me for my experience of what love is and should be; another ten years of carrying that poem around in my pocket - of reciting it to myself in the bath and in bed when it's dark - has done nothing to make any of it even slightly true. And, just as my view of love has changed now, so - too - has Sonnet 116. Just as I have now altered, so - too - has the poem I grew up holding on to.

Where it used to be an affirmation of love, now it is a question. Where it used to be a celebration, now it is a mourning. Far from being about what love is, Sonnet 116 is more about what love should be: what, in short, it is not. And the doubt and the insecurity in Shakespeare's voice - the doubt I didn't see at seventeen, and now see too clearly - are everywhere. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments; impediments that he can see, too clearly, or they would not need admitting and he would not need to struggle against seeing them and voicing them. Love is not love which alters; it is alteration that undoes the love, instead of being love that wins against the alteration. The worth of that wandering bark is unknown - for worse, as well as for better - and it stands, unsuccessfully, against the sickle that cuts down the beauty that he accuses it of creating to start with.

It is - perhaps - not a cry for love at all; rather, it is a cry against the difference between the love we hope for, and the love we get. For, in the final two lines -

And if this be error, and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved -

maybe he means: if love does not exist in the only way it can - permanently, inflexibly, infallibly - then his writing doesn't exist either, because it has all - every last word of it, from Othello to King Lear to Hamlet to Much Ado About Nothing - been built on the hope that it does, and the fear that it does not. And - for all the apparent positivity - at the very end the only thing left hanging in the air - the part that still echoes when the poem has finished - are the final four words, which undo everything else; 


no man ever loved.

The meaning of my favourite Sonnet has changed, for me, along with how I now see love. I have stopped reading those books; I have stopped loving Wuthering Heights, or Pride and Prejudice, or anything else that makes love the point of it. I have stopped assuming that it will find me: I have stopped assuming that it exists at all. My love of love has finished; my hope of it has totally gone. I don't believe that it exists, anymore, the only way it can: the only love I have seen is temporary, and fluctuating, and cruel, and painful, and changing, and brief, and I have seen nothing to prove otherwise. I have seen nothing to turn that poem back into an affirmation, or to answer that question. And so, finally - after nearly thirty years - I have stopped believing in it, or wanting it, or wanting to have anything to do with it. I want to stay as far away from the pretense of love as I can, for as long as I can, and have a life without it, and without the hope of it.

But I still carry the poem with me, and I still recite it in the bath and in the dark when everybody else is asleep. Because the poem is real and permanent, even if the love hoped for within it is not. And although love may not exist - and I'm not at all sure that it does - I believe that it should do.

And, if it does, it should exist exactly as it is in Sonnet 116.