George Wyndham calls this the first sonnet to address the problem of the rival poet; Beeching and others, however, differentiate the poet mentioned here from the one later seen competing with Shakespeare's speaker for the affections of a male beloved. Larsen asserts that the "Muse", to which the poet takes exception here and whom through "compare" he parodies to make his own point, differs from the tenth "Muse" of Sonnet 38, although the two sonnets share vocabulary, rhyme and the theme of praise.