The poem is among the better-known and more frequently anthologized of the sonnets. It is commonly regarded as exemplary of Shakespeare's skill at evoking ambivalence and at creating complex personae. L. C. Knights regarded the first quatrain as typically Elizabethan, but praises the phonic and syntactic complexity of the second quatrain. As Booth writes, "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" (192).