I'm not sure this is unsentimental. N is visiting the graveyard with flowers after all and is commemorating the fact in the form of a sonnet, which is elegiac by nature.
The message can be summed up as: "The human race is not/ improvable." Underlying this statement is an unspoken agenda that the human race should be improvable. In its fight to be unsentimental this sonnet betrays sentimentality.
Not that I'm averse to sentimentality.
Duncan
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