In Sonnet 35, one of the most apparent points that critics have addressed is the duality of the poem's tone. The first quatrain describes what at first appears to be praise and is followed by the second quatrain, in which the speaker addresses a lover's sin and the corruption of himself as a result. Stephen Booth draws attention to the discrepancies between the first and second quatrains and remedies this discrepancy by explaining the speaker's true purpose in the first quatrain. He says, "This sonnet is a variation of Shakespeare's habits of damning with fulsome praise and of making flattering accusations." The speaker lists sarcastic praises, which are supposed to be read as if the speaker was recalling these excuses he made for his sinful lover with contempt. Quatrain 2 creates "a competition in guilt between the speaker and the beloved." The competition grows with the speaker's attempt to justify his sin of becoming the accomplice by degrading the beloved. This leads to an escalation in quatrain 3, where the speaker declares his inner turmoil. He says, "Such civil war is in my love and hate." This conflict within the speaker leads to the couplet, which according to Booth declares the "beloved diminished under a new guilt of being the beneficiary of the speaker's ostentatious sacrifice." In summation, Booth's reaction to Sonnet 35 is that "the facts the poem reports should make the speaker seem admirable in a reader's eyes; the speaker's manner, however, gives conviction to the idea that he is worthy of the contempt he says he deserves."