Alack, what poverty my Muse brings forth, That having such a scope to show her pride, The argument, all bare, is of more worth Than when it hath my added praise beside!

Look in your glass, and there appears a face That over-goes my blunt invention quite, Dulling my lines and doing me disgrace.

It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.

The poet says that his feeble lines cannot do justice to the subject's beauty, but merely mar it with their own inadequacy.

It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form ABAB CDCD EFEF GG and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions.