Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 and The Holy Instant

For anyone who has learned to perceive truly through A Course in Miracles, it is no surprise that the Course provides a framework for all of our life experiences. In His Introduction to the Workbook, Jesus says:

If true perception has been achieved in connection with any person, situation or event, total transfer to everyone and everything is certain. W-p1.Intro.5:2

This makes it possible to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s true intent in his sonnet is absolutely consistent with the Course.

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.

The best way for me to approach the meaning of this sonnet is to recognize who is speaking to whom. The speaker is addressing his lover who is saying, basically, you did me wrong by not meeting my demands of romantic love, the requirements of a special relationship. You impeded its fullest development.

Right in the beginning of the sonnet, the speaker shifts the argument for a special relationship to a higher level, the marriage of true minds, a holy relationship.


Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.

Shakespeare calls his lover's vague accusations impediments. The word impediment means “to check our progress, to strike against our feet,” coming from the Latin pedis, meaning “foot.” The speaker is saying, I will not allow the admittance of this judgment into my mind to prevent me from the awareness that love is one, the marriage of true minds.

That love is one is echoed in this passage from the Course:

Perhaps you think that different kinds of
love are possible. Perhaps you think there is
a kind of love for this, a kind for that;
a way of loving one, another way
of loving still another. Love is one.
It has no separate parts and no degrees;
no kinds nor levels, no divergencies
and no distinctions. It is like itself,
unchanged throughout.W-p.1.127.1:1-5
Experiencing this oneness is the holy instant.

The holy instant is a time in which you receive and give perfect communication. This means, however, that it is a time in which your mind is open, both to receive and give. It is the recognition that all minds are in communication. It therefore seeks to change nothing, but merely to accept everything. T-15.lV.6:5-8

The holy instant is the Holy Spirit's most useful learning device for teaching you love's meaning. For its purpose is to suspend judgment entirely. Judgment always rests on the past, for past experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past, for without it you do not understand anything. T-15.V.1:1-4
Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

It never alters with
a person or a circumstance. It is
the Heart of God, and also of His Son.

Love's meaning is obscure to anyone
who thinks that love can change. He does not see
that changing love must be impossible.
And thus he thinks that he can love at times,
and hate at other times. He also thinks
that love can be bestowed on one, and yet
remain itself although it is
withheld from others. To believe these things
of love is not to understand it. If it could
make such distinctions, it would have to judge
between the righteous and the sinner, and
perceive the Son of God in separate parts.
W-p1.127.2

The speaker remains steadfast in his awareness of total love, the marriage of true minds, recognizing that this love does not alter, and he will not bend with his lover to remove that which is not real. His beloved is looking for certainty in specialness. The following passage is particularly powerful if you imagine Jesus addressing the lover expressing grievances.

You cannot love parts of reality and understand what love means. If you would love unlike to God, Who knows no special love, how can you understand it? To believe that special relationships, with special love, can offer you salvation is the belief that separation is salvation. For it is the complete equality of the Atonement in which salvation lies. How can you decide that special aspects of the Sonship can give you more than others? The past has taught you this. Yet the holy instant teaches you it is not so. T-15.V.3

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.

This expresses the speaker’s constancy to the marriage of true minds in contrast to altering or bending or removing. To illustrate this constancy Shakespeare uses the metaphor of the Northern Star that over the centuries has provided an ever-fixed mark for mariners, enabling them to orient themselves on the dark ocean, sailing their barks, their boats. Although the distance between the Northern Star and your boat can be measured, his height be taken, its value to mariners is immeasurable, having saved an untold number of lives throughout the generations.

This ever-fixed mark is like a touch of Heaven.

Everyone on earth has formed special relationships, and although this is not so in Heaven, the Holy Spirit knows how to bring a touch of Heaven to them here. In the holy instant no one is special, for your personal needs intrude on no one to make your brothers seem different. Without the values from the past, you would see them all the same and like yourself. Nor would you see any separation between yourself and them. In the holy instant, you see in each relationship what it will be when you perceive only the present. T-15.V.8

The speaker is capable of bringing a touch of Heaven to their special relationship, but his lover is incapable.

Shakespeare also uses this metaphor to express Caesar’s constancy in his play, Julius Caesar. In the Senate on the Ides of March, as the senators and conspirators press in on Caesar, presenting their petitions, he becomes angry and declares that he will not be moved by their pleading, these couchings and these lowly courtesies, as an ordinary man might be. He declares that he is constant.

I could be well moved, if I were as you:
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks,
They are all fire and every one doth shine,
But there's but one in all doth hold his place:
So in the world.
Julius Caesar.3.1:58-66
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Because of guilt, all special relationships have elements of fear in them. This is why they shift and change so frequently. They are not based on changeless love alone. And love, where fear has entered, cannot be depended on because it is not perfect. In His function as Interpreter of what you made, the Holy Spirit uses special relationships, which you have chosen to support the ego, as learning experiences that point to truth. Under His teaching, every relationship becomes a lesson in love. T-15.V.4

Special relationships are based on things as they appear to be in time and space, and a love based on these appearances, being Time’s fool, vanishes like men before the Grim Reaper.

The ego's use of relationships is so fragmented that it frequently goes even farther; one part of one aspect suits its purposes, while it prefers different parts of another aspect. Thus does it assemble reality to its own capricious liking, offering for your seeking a picture whose likeness does not exist. For there is nothing in Heaven or earth that it resembles, and so, however much you seek for its reality, you cannot find it because it is not real. T-15.V.7

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

There is no love but God's, and all of love
is His. There is no other principle
that rules where love is not. Love is a law without an opposite. Its wholeness is
the power holding everything as one,
the link between the Father and the Son which holds Them Both forever as the same.
W-p1.127.3:5-8

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

In the couplet, the speaker asserts that he is so sure of what he has just expressed about the nature of the marriage of true minds, that if anyone can prove him wrong, then he never wrote and no one ever loved. This assertion places his lover in an untenable position, knowing that the speaker has written and that others have loved.

To this point, my emphasis has been on the content of the sonnet, but I would be remiss if I did not point out how the meaning of the sonnet is an exquisite blend of content and form, sense and sound, structure and meaning. Shakespeare gave himself the task of both expressing his meaning completely, and following the demands of this particular structure:

1) The sonnet will consist of three sets of four lines, or quatrains, and end with a rhyming couplet.

2) The quatrains will rhyme in a particular pattern. The convention is to assign each rhyme a letter of the alphabet, starting with “a.”

Quatrain 1: a, minds, b, love, a, finds, b, remove
Quatrain 2: c, mark, d, shaken, c, bark, d, taken
Quatrain 3: e, cheeks, f, come, e, weeks, f, doom
Rhyming couplet: g, proved, g, loved

3) The rhythm will be iambic pentameter, meaning five sets of iambs, an iamb is: slack STRESS.

let ME/ not TO/ the MAR/ riage OF/ true MINDS

Shakespeare was a consummate artist in blending content and form, posturing our voices to experience the full meaning of his intent. For example, in the first line of the sonnet he emphasizes ME, from the very beginning contrasting his constancy to the Holy Instant with the young man’s inconstancy, and emphasizing MINDS, not bodies. He is declaring that he will not allow his awareness to dwell on thoughts that prevent him from experiencing the joining of their minds.

As we saw in the passage from Julius Caesar, this also the rhythm of his thirty-seven plays:

but I am CON stant AS the NOR thern STAR

In His Course, Jesus exquisitely postures our voices as we say His words in our minds. In the Text, Chapters 26-31, and in the Workbook, Lessons 99-365 are written in blank verse. Even as we read these passages in prose form, the sheer poetry of His unworldly masterpiece flows on our breaths carrying the words, commingling with the beating of our hearts:

the HUSH of HEAV en HOLDS my HEART to DAY



Please take a look my ten-minute video where I briefly demonstrate how Jesus postures our voices by using blank verse. Go to my web site and click on the title, "The Sheer Poetry of A Course in Miracles." Click here.