on the clumsiness of the first line and suggested that the quarto text represents an unrevised draft that found its way into print. Source and analysis Edward Massey and others asserted that the poem was directly inspired by a poem in Henry Constable's Diana (1592); T. W. Baldwin rejected this claim while noting that the same Constable sonnet had inspired a passage in The Rape of Lucrece. At any rate, the conceit is common, and parallels have been found in the poems by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Campion, and others. George Wilson praised the poem as an example of synesthesia. The sonnet has attracted some attention as one of those that appears to provide clues about the historical identity of Shakespeare's subject (on the traditional assumption that the poems are in some sense autobiographical). In 1904, C. C. Stopes noted the existence of a portrait of Southampton at Welbeck Abbey in which his hair curls in a manner similar to young marjoram. This analysis has been disputed by scholars who assert that smell, rather than appearance, is the primary referent of Shakespeare's line. Because of the extravagant praise of the beloved's body, some Victorian scholars were reluctant to believe that the poem was addressed to a man; current consensus, however, groups it with the other poems written to the young man. Notes References Baldwin, T. W. On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1950. Lee, Sidney. Elizabethan Sonnets. Westminster: Constable, 1904. Stopes, C. C. Shakespeare's Sonnets. London: Alexander Morig, 1904. Wilson, George. The Five Gateways of Knowledge. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1856. British poems Sonnets by William Shakespeare