William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist. He is also known for his sonnets, Sonnet 116 attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and is not. In the first stanza, Shakespeare says that love is: ”the marriage of true minds”—is perfect and unchanging, it does not “admit impediments,” and it does not change when it find changes in the loved one. This represents the theme of love as he is trying to explain what love is and what it is not. 

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 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 prov’d, 
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.