Following George Wyndham, John Bernard notes the neoplatonic underpinnings of the poem, which derive ultimately from Petrarch: the beloved's transcendent beauty is variously diffused through the natural world, but is purer at its source. The reference to Adonis has led numerous scholars, among them Georg Gottfried Gervinus, to explore connections to "Venus and Adonis"; Gerald Massey notes that the twinned references to Adonis and Helen underscore the sense of the beloved's androgyny, most famously delineated in Sonnet 20. Hermann Isaac notes that the first quatrain resembles a sonnet by Tasso. In support of his hypothesis that the person addressed in the sonnet was an actor, Oscar Wilde hypothesized that the poem's "shadows" refer to the young man's roles.