The sonnet opens with a line of proclamation, declaring that it is not the intention of the voice to prevent the 'marriage of true minds' [1] . In essence the voice is pre-empting what is to follow in which the voice outlines their mandate of what true love actually is. This is something that is quantified by the following statement, 'love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds' (116 l.3); this outlines the voice's main thesis that true love is unwavering and unchanging, it is not something that wavers or bends in the face of outside influences. However it is not only the influences of the outside world that are unable to effect it, as the voice goes on to state that it does not 'bends with the remover to remove.' (116 l.4), meaning that even when the object of the object of the affection itself is removed the love for that object or person remains. Indeed the voice continues with this assertion of true love as a permanent fixture by saying 'is is an ever-fixed mark' (116 l.5). The comparison of love as a 'mark' (116 l.5) is an interesting one as a mark can be interpreted as a blemish or indeed even as a form of deformity. William Blake uses the word as a identifier of negativity in his poem 'London', stating that the people that are shown in the poem exhibit 'Marks of weakness, marks of woe.' [2] . Shakespeare however asserts that a person's personality and conscious can also be marked with a positive emotion, therefore reversing the effect of the word 'mark' (116 l.5) from one of negative deformity to one of a positive identifier.