The "ever-fixed mark" of Sonnet 116

As I was trying to figure out where my love of poetry came from, suddenly the memory of my ninth-grade self sitting in English class expanded before me. My teacher was reciting Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 without the text. She had it memorized and recited it with such feeling, like she was savoring   every   word  . The only sound in the classroom was her voice. The lyrical sounds of the words rolled over me like a wave and the meaning of the words resonated with my heart on some higher plane. "Yes! That is exactly what love is!" I thought. It is "an ever-fixed mark"! Love is "the star to every wandering bark"! Love is not "Time's fool"! The poem expressed the nature of love perfectly in only 14 lines. How could the poem depict such a sprawling concept of love in such a short poem? I was enthralled by not only Sonnet 116 but by all poetry and its power to express what the heart felt in concrete words.
When my senior year English class rolled around and required us to memorize two poems, I knew immediately that sonnet 116 would be one of them. The other poem I have long since forgotten, but sonnet 116 bore it out “to the edge of doom” and stuck with me. Its impact has not diminished in the slightest since the first time I heard it. But what has changed is how much I appreciate the message as well as understand it better the more I experience love. It’s like the words become more true and poignant after every crush and every heart-break. What I mean is that I didn’t know completely what love was when I was 14, and I certainly don’t completely understand it now, but sonnet 116 continues to give me a vision of what it should be like. As I continue to go through this crash-course of life, sonnet 116 continues to contain some core truth about love that will never change. For me that is partially what is beautiful about poetry--it has the power to remind us of the immutable universal truths that remain under the world's tempermental exterior.