Joel Fineman argues that in this sonnet, the poet feels trapped by the Dark Lady, who represents the constraints of a heteronormative society. She has taken the "friend", or the poet's homosexual side, from him, preventing the poet from living in his self-created utopia of homosexuality with the Young Man. Unlike the young man sequence, in which the poet "defines his own identity [. . .] as poet and lover", in the Dark Lady sequence, particularly sonnet 133, "the poet-lover of the [Lady will discover both himself and his poetry in the loss produced by the fracture of ideal identification as homosexual".