Theme:     Beauty
Content:   The male subject being described as having better qualities than any man or woman in an avalanche of hews and hues that may identify the subject.

• "You have the beauty of a woman, and a woman's gentleness, but not the inconstancy of a false woman."
• The subject is clearly being correlated with the positive qualities of woman here.
• Face, false and fashion provide connecting alliteration between the subject and woman. Again, Shakespeare refers to fashion in a dismissive way.
• painted is usually portrayed by Shakespeare as a lesser art than poetry, something that is counterfeit, but here it is used in a positive sense by Nature.
• passion means the poet's sonnets. This reference to "passion" is often mistakenly interpreted as having a sexual connotation when it is more akin to publications like The Passionate Pilgrim or even Christ's "passion" on the cross: Acts 1:3: "To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs".
• master-mistress refers to the fact that the subject of a sonnet was usually a woman / mistress, but in this instance it is the Young Man, therefore the ambiguity in what is expected and what is actually referred to. This also helps define the subject as having the best qualities of either gender.
  
• Line 1 contains the word hew in hand...face...woman.
• Line 2 contains the word hue in Hast...thou...the.
• Line 3 contains the word hew in heart...gentle...woman.
• Line 4 contains the word hew in shifting...women.

• "You bless what you see and draw the envy of all who see you."
• Hews is italicised in the Quarto as Hews, suggesting it has special significance. Perhaps it alludes to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd. Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's patron.
• Line 5 contains the word hew in bright...eye...rowling (Quarto spelling).
• Line 6 anagrammatically contains the word hew in whereupon.
• Line 7 explicitly contains the word hew in hew and hews. This is significant as line 7 is the centre-line of the sonnet just as the play on hew/hue is central to the sonnet's theme.
  
• Line 8 contains the word hew in Which...women's.
• Emphasis on the women correlation continues and apparently to provide the much-needed w to construct the omnipresent hews..
• Falsehood appears again in the form of the lesser qualities of woman which are not ascribed to the subject - he only has the positive qualities of women and by virtue of being a man by default has only the positive qualities of a man.
• The subject is the finest thing that Nature has created, one who attracts the praise of both men and women.

• "You were first created as a woman until nature robbed me of you by making you a man."
• Mother Nature selfishly changes the sex of the subject at creation from female to male (the opposite to her) and in doing so robs the poet (who is male) of a potential female companion.
• Line 9 contains the word hew in thou...created...woman.
• Line 10 contains the word hew in she wrought.
• Line 11 almost contains the word hew in thee, perhaps deliberately incomplete as 2 hews were provided in line 7 thereby providing 14 hews in this 14-line sonnet.
• Line 12 contains the word hue in thing...purpose.
• Emphasis on the woman correlation continues.
• wrought thee may be a pun on Wriothesley
• by addition is, of course, the addition of the male appendage.
• nothing is Elizabethan slang for the female genitalia, so Nature has added one thing (a penis) to what the author would have preferred for himself: a woman with a nothing.

• Emphasis on women correlation concludes.
• Line 13 contains the word hew in thee...women.
• Line 14 contains the word hue in thy loue (Quarto spelling) and phonetically in use.
• Obvious pun on the male sexual organ in pricked which explicitly directs the subject to have heterosexual relations with women. It is curious that some see homosexuality in this poem when the poet clearly states that the subject being equipped with a male appendage literally "defeats" the prospect of a sexual relationship between the two, that was there whilst the subject was originally fashioned by Nature to be a woman. A homosexual man would, of course, be keenly interested in the sexual equipment and inclinations of another man he was attracted to. But the poet here unequivocally states that the subject being made into a man removes any sexual dimension to their relationship and that he is "pricked out" specifically and exclusively for "womens' pleasure": the natural sentiments of a heterosexual man and the complete opposite of what you would expect from a homosexual man. Perhaps the author stating unequivocally that there is no prospect of sexual intimacy between the two of them is prompted by the subject being bisexual, if not homosexual. That the subject has needed so much prompting in the first 17 sonnets to get married and father children strongly supports this notion.
  
• Use of treasure again as a euphemism for the female genitalia.
• From start to finish, this sonnet uniquely has feminine line endings, emphasising the woman theme central to it.