While the stylistic importance of Shakespeare’s sonnets stands without doubt, Samuel Daniel’s Sonnet 46 from Delia offers a somewhat simpler, refreshing take on a generally ornate form. Daniel’s piece serves as a sort of preemptive elegy to his speaker’s beloved, employing more exultation than lamentation, lending it a more optimistic and reverent tone. The speaker spurns the notion of a – in his eyes – dated courtly love, instructing “others [to] sing of knights and paladins” (Daniel 965, 1), and he dismisses words and “agèd accents” that he deems “untimely” (obsolete) (Daniel 965, 2). He simply seeks to sing of his love and her “fair eyes” (Daniel 965, 5), rather than creating an elaborate metaphor to illustrate their beauty. Though Daniel adopts a form of the past in composing a sonnet, he undermines this form from within by updating its language and subject matter to fit the contemporary moment. Like Shakespeare, his speaker does address the march of time as an unstoppable force, but he takes heart in the fact that his words, his “arks” and “trophies” (Daniel 965, 9) will immortalize his beloved – will “fortify [her] name against old age” (Daniel 965, 10) – whatever beauty she may lose in the passing years, and encourages his reader to do the same. The speaker is entirely self-conscious of the simplicity of his words, which he feels might be interpreted as inexperience or lack of talent – “th’error of [his] youth” (Daniel 965, 13) – but these words “show [he] lived and was [her] lover” (Daniel 965, 14), which is all he seeks to show in composing this to her. He does not feel the need to lament their eventual descent into old age, or to aggressively pressure her into procreation before her beauty fades – he just wants to show he loves her. A million overly florid poems could not express true love so clearly, so simply, as this one, and its shift in language also signals a shift toward modernity.