It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the speaker expresses his love towards a young man.

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

The second line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: Shakespeare most likely wrote the sonnets that were meant for the young man over a four- or five-year period.

[4] There is speculation that the young man Shakespeare is addressing may be named William Hughs or Hews.

However, Alfred Douglas believes that line 10 of the poem completely exonerates the young man of such an offense, because Shakespeare admits his own guilt.

The message of the sonnet is best summed up when the speaker says, "I may not ever-more acknowledge thee, / Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame," (lines 9-10) implying that the young lover would be shamed if others knew he and the speaker knew each other.

According to Helen Vendler, author of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, there is a parallel of phrases in the same lines that represent unity and divisions respectively.

These discrepancies with thematic links and common word usage have given legitimacy to the argument that the Sonnets may not be in a finalized order.

[8] Blackmore Evans suggested that Sonnet 36 was influenced by Ephesians 5:25-33, "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

This link is most strongly exemplified in the first two lines of Sonnet 36, "Let me confess that we two must be twain, Although our undivided loves are one:"[7] Stephen Booth adds that Ephesians 5 was a regular source of inspiration for Shakespeare.

Booth suggests that the "blots" in line 3 of Sonnet 36 may be an allusion to Eph 5:27, "...without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish..." There is also a parallel in motivation between the speaker's self-sacrifice in accepting separation for his lover's sake and Christ's marriage to the church.