In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare’s tone is idealistic, maintaining that true love “is an ever-fixed mark” and never changes or “alters when it alteration finds”. He confidently states that true love lasts forever, and “alters not with his brief hours and weeks”. Shakespeare’s conviction that love “looks on tempests and is never shaken” reveals a naïveté seldom found in Shakespeare. His firm declaration in the final couplet that “if this be error and upon me proved,/ I never writ, nor no man ever loved”, further emphasises his certainty. In Sonnet 2, the speaker’s tone is more cynical. Rather than romanticising love and beauty, Shakespeare expresses disdain for the cliché of beauty lasting forever, within “thine own deep-sunken eyes”. Sonnet 2 is addressed to a young man, presumably Shakespeare’s lover. Shakespeare condescendingly states that once “forty winters … besiege thy brow,/ and dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,” his only worth may be found if he raises a child. The speaker scares his subject by reminding him of his own mortality. Both Sonnets address the topic of beauty fading as time progresses. In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare declares that “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips an cheeks/ within his bending sickle’s compass come”, saying that even as death draws nearer and beauty fades, love…