February, the one month of the year we turn our eyes from the fluffy piles of snow outside our window inside - toward the ones we love. Our thoughts linger on flowers, chocolate, perhaps a romantic dinner out. And what better way to send loving sentiments than with a poem. I set out in search of the greatest love poem ever written only to discover there was little agreement between the list makers. If a poem was on the top ten of all time, it didn’t appear to make the cut for the top one hundred on someone else’s list. I felt sorry for some of the list makers with their poems of drinking and aloneness. Not my idea of a great love.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 made a few of the lists and took the number one spot on a couple of them. Though it is not mushy, it contains a foreverness that comforts and buoys up the soul. Happy Valentines!
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-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.
Jeremiah 31:3 NLT
"I have loved you, my people, with an everlasting love. With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself.”