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.
- in ITALIAN: Non sia mai ch'io ponga impedimenti all'unione di anime fedeli; Amore non è Amore se muta quando scopre un mutamento o tende a svanire quando l'altro s'allontana. Oh no! Amore è un faro sempre fisso che sovrasta la tempesta e non vacilla mai; è la stella-guida di ogni sperduta barca, il cui valore è sconosciuto, benché nota la distanza. Amore non è soggetto al Tempo, pur se rosee labbra e gote dovran cadere sotto la sua curva lama; Amore non muta in poche ore o settimane, ma impavido resiste al giorno estremo del giudizio: se questo è errore e mi sarà provato, io non ho mai scritto, e nessuno ha mai amato.
again, we have this sonnet twice (see previous page) about the feelings of love described here, it is also an unconventional love, even more unconventional in the Elizabethan world than it is today. But it is precisely this unconventionality that gives to the sonnets their subversive tone, and it is that tone which forces us, not so much to be on the defensive, but to question more profoundly what we mean by the word love.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
Behold, Fellow Poets, this poem and see why Shakespeare is so revered and deservedly important. Like others I think Will's greatest poetry is in his plays. But there has yet to come, in my opinion, one who wrote better sonnets in English. Note how it flows. I have no idea how quickly it came through his inspired mind and quill, but it sounds like came right out; it exemplifies the word mellifluous. True and profound, it sings in the memory. And if it needed more as an imprimatur, it has its closing couplet. For me it has its place with 1 Corinthians 13 among the few greatest statements about love ever. In praise, Glen Kappy