What is True Love?

 

 

 

 

 

 

True Love is Selfless. It is prepared to sacrifice. Sadhu Vaswani 

“Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.” Madame de Stael

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” e. e. cummings

Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds, William Shakespeare, Sonnet # 16

 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.

  What Shakespeare is referring to in this love sonnet: As the title suggests, the poem argues that true love will not be impeded, changed or stopped by transitory circumstances. True love, implicitly opposed to lust or some shallower form of affection, is a fixed form: the narrator describes it as “an ever-fixed mark.” The poem sets it in opposition to all that is changeable.

If the love between two people is real, it will rise above whatever temporary material conditions might get in its way. If trouble comes, which the poet likens to “tempests” or storms, true lovers are not “shaken” by this. If time ravages the looks of the beloved, wreaking damage on rosy cheeks and lips, that doesn’t matter either: love transcends physical appearance. The poet likens true love to a star that stays unchanging in the sky. It is eternal. The poem argues that true love is a perfect, Platonic form based on the union of minds, impervious to what can happen to the body.

If we understand this sonnet as the voice of a lover speaking to his beloved, it mounts a strong and fervent argument in favor of the depth and sincerity of the poet’s love, reflecting the heart of a person who even promises to stay with the beloved to “the edge of doom.”  Written by F. Steinbeck 2016