The Treasure Hunt

Sunday March 30, 2014 10:30 am

Can love change? Can love end? Can love become hate? No... No... No!!! Not true love, not real love! There is a famous sonnet by Shakespeare where he likens 'true love' to the North star. It is simply and forever a fixed and unchanging point of light!

Hurt can cause doubt! Longing and separation can make love, at times, seem not to even be worth it! However, at the end of the day and despite the hurt, the heartache, the need, the sadness... there is still the present knowledge that love yet endures!!!!!!!

Shakespeare wrote that “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds...” Simply stated he is saying that regardless what changes might occur in a relationship: love itself can never change!

I love the lines which state that true love will outlast time! (It gives me hope that in a timeless eternity things will finally work out!) The longest life on Earth when compared to time is so very brief! In this sonnet he compares a life lived in terms of "brief hours and weeks..." But at the end of time... love is still there! “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” He also wrote that love is, "... not Time's fool..." Though 'time' robs us of all things... even that hateful specter of time can not steal away true love!

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-fixèd 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.

The ending is perfect! After explaining what true love is, he wrote that if he is wrong about it: the idea of true love... then he, Shakespeare, never wrote... and no man ever loved!!! (If this error upon me be proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.)

I think Love, true love can be the greatest blessing God ever bestowed upon the heart of man. Yet, at the same time and for myriad reasons... love, true love can be a damnable curse as well!!! For it can steal away a man's happiness :(