ears and then the "fears" of the whole world:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom (1-4).
This link is important, signifying the way individual lives are governed by the signs used to make prophecies and the way huge world-wide disasters will affect individuals as well. Because of the signs in the world at large, the individual thought his love would be forfeit by this time. The signs were wrong.
Of course, this does not mean that the poet has lost his belief in signs; it is merely that the signs have changed so that now the future looks much brighter:
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age (7-8).
In the first four lines, the poet notes the fears and prophecies and how they have not affected his love. In the next four, lines he details how the world has changed from the time of the earlier prophecies and how the world has resolved many of its tensions to produce a new and more peaceful situation. Alliteration is used in line five to express the idea that Queen Elizabeth is the "mortal moon." It appears again in line eight as "peace proclaims," so these four lines begin and end with an alliterative sequence. The only other place alliteration appears is in the second line with the term "world wide."
The next four lines, from 9 through 12, combines the ideas from the first two stanzas. Here the poet looks to the future after dismissing the past and celebrating the present. The future is brighter as he sees how fresh his love has become, and he challenges dea
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