Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you, That did my ripe thoughts in my brain in-hearse, Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?

[3][4] The sonnet's imagery of sea going vessels ("proud full sail") recalls the mighty galleons of the Spanish Armada that fought the British fleet of smaller, more nimble ships.

In the opening lines of the sonnet, "[Shakespeare] charmingly suggests an inhibition through jealousy, not of superior poetic powers, but of encountering the Fair Young Man's portrait in a rival's verses.

[12] The couplet returns to a primary theme of the entire Rival Poet group: that the young man is the only source of inspiration and the only proper subject.

The couplet shows two extremes of response that the young man and his desire for flattery causes in his poets: the over-inflated verse of the rival and the silence of the speaker.

It follows the rhyme scheme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG and is composed in iambic pentameter, a metre of five feet per line, with two syllables in each foot accented weak/strong.

Nearly every well-known poet contemporary with Shakespeare has been suggested,[24] including George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Barnabe Barnes, Gervase Markham,[25] and Richard Barnfield.

[28] The phrase "Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead" (line 6) has suggested to some Christopher Marlowe (who died in 1593) and his play Tamburlaine the Great.

Of the "affable familiar ghost" found in line nine, Duncan-Jones writes: "The phrase seems to carry an allusion to some well-known relationship between a poet and his Muse or inspiring genius, such as Chapman's with the spirit of Homer.