Inspiration for An Ever Fixed Mark

I thought I'd post the poem which inspired the name of my Novel, An Ever Fixed Mark. If you like Jane Austin novels or have seen the film Sense and Sensibility, you will have heard it recited by Maryanne Dashwood and John Willoby.

It's one of my favorites, but I can only recite by memory half of it.


Here is the whole thing:

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
Which 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