As it is February and of course St Valentine’s Day, I thought I would share my favourite Shakespearean sonnet with you:
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.
William Shakespeare
This sonnet always makes me think of Paul McCartney’s song: When I’m 64. ‘Will you still be sending me a Valentine?’ I’ve read that he decided not to use 65 as the age (the retirement age then) as it seemed too predictable. Of course at the time 64 would have seemed so very old to a young McCartney and to me. This very famous song was never released as a single. It was on the Sergeant Pepper album. Nowadays, apparently, in old people’s homes they change the number to 94 in singing sessions!