Sonnets for February

Yes...we're officially in the month of romance!  I thought it would be nice to delve into some Shakespearean sonnets for the season.  It's both romantic and educational.  I've been rereading many of them lately, and have been surprised how moving they are.  I think the last time I read them was shortly after my husband and I became engaged (insert sigh), but the sonnets are even more applicable now!

Let's start off with some of the more well-known.  Here is sonnet CXVI, which you may recognize as the combined favorite of Marianne Dashwood and Mr. Willoughby.  Well, we all know how that turned out!  As an ardent reader of Shakespearean sonnets, Marianne should have known that a vast majority of them were written for mature lovers.  There's a lesson for you teens and tweens...no matter what you feel now, those old married couples have the deepest love of all.  Marianne started to understand the sonnets truly after Sense and Sensibility had finished it's last chapter.

Ahem...so back to the sonnet...

CXVI

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 prov'd,

  I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

<<Sigh>>  I must admit, there are days when I feel like Time's bending sickle has hacked down my beauty!  Isn't it good to know that with real love it doesn't matter so much what you look like as what you are?