Sonnet 116

It is hard to imagine a more perfect sonnet, even with all the beautiful words Shakespeare wrote. I remember hearing this when I was a teenager and was watching 'sense and sensibility' for the first time. I availed myself of a Spanish copy of the sonnets not long after that and to this day I can recite most of 116 in Spanish. Today, listening to NPR I found a link to the sonnet being read as it was probably meant to sound back when the bard wrote it... so without further adieu:

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.  



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And for a paraphrase of it:
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/116detail.html