Summary of the poem 'Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds'

    This sonnet is about eternal and unchanging love and has been cherished in the past four hundred years for its hopeful and promising note. Its structure and form are the typical example of the Shakespearean sonnet. 

    This sonnet attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and is not. In the first quatrain (First four lines), the speaker says that love—”the marriage of true minds”—is perfect and unchanging; it does not “admit impediments,” and it does not change when it find changes in the loved one. 

    In the second quatrain, the speaker tells what love is through a metaphor: a guiding star to lost ships (“wandering barks”) that is not susceptible to storms (it “looks on tempests and is never shaken”). 

    In the third quatrain, the speaker again describes what love is not: it is not susceptible to time. Though beauty fades in time as rosy lips and cheeks come within “his bending sickle’s compass,” love does not change with hours and weeks: instead, it “bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

     In the couplet, the speaker attests to his certainty that love is as he says: if his statements can be proved to be error, he declares, he must never have written a word, and no man can ever have been in love.