Or whether doth my mind, being crown'd with you,
Drink up the monarch's plague, this flattery?
Or whether shall I say, mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy,
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This sonnet, taking up again the ideas of the previous one, hinges on a quasi-philosophical conundrum as to which of the two, the eye or the mind, are guilty of the greatest sin, the mind in being deceived by flattery, or the eye in transforming all base images by a sort of arcane alchemy into images of the youth. Why either of these should be regarded as sinful is not clearly stated, unless it is harking back once again to the possibility of idolatry and idolatrous loving, first raised in Sonnet 105 and made the subject of various speculations thereafter.