I've been reading the quirky and thought-provoking Radioactive, by Lauren Redniss. It tells the story of Marie and Pierre Curie, as they discover radium, polonium, and their terrifying properties. It also explores the imbrication of marriage, love, decay, fallout, light, heat, and death, in a provocatively visual way. This week's Saturday sonnet is an old favorite that takes up all of these themes, newly reinflected for me by Redniss' work.
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--
oh, no. It is an ever-fixed mark
that looks on tempests and is never shaken;
it is the star to every wand'ring 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.
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)
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