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Monday, July 30, 2007

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

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.

1 comment:

Davo said...

In going over to my library after reading this post I bash my pinkytoe to mincemeat. Hopping, I find the book and bounce it back to the computer. Jan Bervin in the book "Nets" has a good number of the Shakespeare sonnets as palimpsests. 116 reads as follows. The line breaks are all I can preserve in this format--the spacing will have to be imagined by highlighting the words in your typed copy of Shakespeare's original...

shaken
wand'ring
worth unknown
compass
even the edge of
error