If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Several readers wrote in to say that they enjoyed that particular essay, and they'd like to see more of the same on the Minstrels. The Shakespeare of the sonnets is a very different person from the playwright who gave us King Lear, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the plays he is the consummate craftsman, entertaining audiences with masterpieces of dramatic effect while exploring human character to a degree seen never before or since. The sonnets, though, reveal a more thoughtful, introspective writer, a philosopher-poet inquiring, especially, into the question of Time and its effect on human affairs.
Time triumphs over flesh, and Love over all.
This is the central idea of today's poem as well, but whereas in the previous sonnet Shakespeare talks about the frailty of the flesh, here he is more concerned with the constancy of Love. Which alters when it alteration finds'.