Having denied time the power to make his love change in the previous poem, William Shakespeare now with Sonnet 124 turns his attention to politics, statehood, and the fashions of a notoriously fickle society, and further delineates his love for his young man against such other, more trivial, more volatile, much more feeble affections as it may be surrounded by and as it may be finding itself compared to or accused of being. When Sonnet 123 addressed time itself directly, this sonnet speaks to no-one in particular but makes a general, and even bolder, assertion that his love is unmatched by any other; that it, in itself, is a kingdom, one might say, which does not rise and fall with fortune or the ever-fluid vagaries of opinion and manipulated opportunity but stands strong and singularly tall.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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