So is it not with me as with that Muse Stirr’d by a painted beauty to his verse, Who heaven itself for ornament doth use And every fair with his fair doth rehearse, Making a couplement of proud compare, With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems, With April’s first-born flowers, and all things rare That heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.

The sixth line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: A reader's sense of meter usually arises chiefly from stresses inherent in the text.

A sensitive reader will place an accent on "my" which in turn will allow ictuses to rest on "my" and "is", producing the well-formed iambic pentameter scanned below, even before the textual reason for the contrastive accent on "my" (as compared to "any mother's") is understood: George Wyndham calls this the first sonnet to address the problem of the rival poet; Beeching and others, however, differentiate the poet mentioned here from the one later seen competing with Shakespeare's speaker for the affections of a male beloved.

Shakespeare will resist their practice of "proud compare" to the sun, moon, the "rich gems" of earth and sea, and "April's first-born flowers", both 'born' and 'borne'.

The line echoes the conclusion of another poem in the sequence, Sonnet 130's "And yet by heaven I think my love as rare, / As any she belied with false compare."

"[3] As William James Rolfe notes, the line, and indeed the final couplet, refer definitely to the type of exaggerated praise that Shakespeare declaims in the sonnet.