(8) Snow Line
Sure, the actual words ol' Shakey uses here don't seem all that confusing. But you can read this poem in about eleventy billion different ways, so that's why we're bumping up the difficulty here.
Is he praising powerful people or blaming them? It isn't easy to say. We at Shmoop certainly can't give you all the answers (we don't know them ourselves). We'd even be willing to bet that Shakespeare felt pretty conflicted about these problems, too. What we can do is show you where the main problems lie, to help you come to your own understanding of what the poem is communicating.