Shakespeare for Valentine’s Day

How are you all celebrating Valentine’s Day? Romantic dinner by candlelight? Box of La Madeline au Truffe (US$25 per gram)? Or doing not much given the high cost of living?

If the latter, here is an unassuming suggestion: Print a copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnet #116 (funny thing about Shakespeare’s sonnets, they go by number instead of title), read it to your sweetheart, then talk a little bit about it. Not a big, deep discussion, please!

Why Sonnet #116? First, this is the most familiar of Shakespeare’s sonnets, so it must be good. Second, for so many folks, Sonnet #116 bursts into an epiphany when read or heard for the first time. Third, many find this sonnet worth revisiting by way of reminder.

So, here is 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-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every 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 proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Depending on our age and social milieu we might know couples that still hold hands walking down the street after 40 years together, or we might know some of today’s ubiquitous single parents (some divorced, some never married).

In Sonnet #116, Shakespeare characterized his view of the hand-holding oldsters – once young with “rosy lips and cheeks.” Challenges surely came their way. Certainly, at times one or the other had to stay steady, like a star, and not bend “with the remover to remove.” Chances are these couples will bear it out “even to the edge of doom.”

Agreed, this is not your typical Valentine’s Day poem, dripping with gleeful passion and lovely allusions. You can tell that from the sonnet’s first line which refers to the “marriage of true minds,” not the marriage of true hearts.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Picture: Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher of James City, North Carolina. This picture is from Deep Roots at Home. As of February 2024 Herbert and Zelmyra still held the Guinness record for the longest married couple: 86 years of marriage. Herbert passed away in 2011 at age 105, and Zelmyra followed him two years later also at 105.

Here is an excerpt from Herbert and Zelmyra’s Choice Secrets Of Successful & Long Marriage, Deep Roots at Home, September 14, 2020.

“Together, as young friends and then later when married, they survived the effects of World War I and II, the Great Depression, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and 15 presidential administrations.

During the Depression, Herbert lived off the land and worked for as little as 5 cents a day. They had to raise their own food and ration it for their five children. Unable to afford a car, Herbert got to work as a mechanic the best way he could. Undaunted, Herbert built their home with his own hands in 1942.“