Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken, While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?

Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee So far from home into my deeds to pry, To find out shames and idle hours in me, The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?

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

It follows the form's typical rhyme scheme, 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.

The seventh line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: The first and third lines have a final extrameterical syllable or feminine ending: Although many rhymes in the sonnets are imperfect in today's pronunciation, they were almost all perfect (or at least potentially so) in Shakespeare's day.