Theme:     Visual & Heartfelt Love
Content:   A courtroom battle between the author's eye and heart for possession and love of the subject.

• The author flatters the subject by stating that his eye and heart are battling over the sight of the subject.
• The eye bars the heart of its ability to see the subject's picture (although that is actually a shortcoming of the heart's facilities); the heart wishes to ban the eye the freedom of that right.
• The turmoil of this war between eye and heart is represented in Mine eye my heart and its reversed My heart, mine eye.

• The author's body now metaphorically assumes a courtroom setting to settle the matter. The author's heart, is the plaintiff, pleading that the subject lies in him as an unseeable chamber. The author's eye, acting as the defendant, denies that plea and says that the subject's image is literally held within it.
• Unusual instance of all 4 lines of this quatrain almost rhyming with each other, perhaps showing how close the arguments of the eye and heart are.

• The verdict is decided by a quest of thoughts, all of whom (being an internal, cerebral jury, rather than an external, visual one) are tenants to the heart and so expected to be biased towards finding in favour of the heart.
• The verdict in this metaphorical court scene however, is an equal share: the eye receiving half of the settlement (a moiety) and the heart receiving the other half.
• These first 12 lines of the sonnet may represent the 12 members of the jury, with the final verdict being delivered in the sonnet's final couplet.

• The author's eye wins the outward appearance of the subject; the heart wins the subject's heart.
• Having associated right with the eye in Q1, the couplet now provides balance by assigning right to the heart too.
• Unusual instance of the couplet rhyming part with heart, the reverse of the previous quatrain's rhyme of heart with part, emphasising the fact that, despite the perceived bias of the jury, the heart only wins its rightful part of the subject: justice is seen to be done. Perhaps also signifying that the expected verdict of full bias in favour of the heart is literally reversed.
• The author, of course, being owner of eye and heart, wins all of the subject.
• Curiously, although there is a balanced verdict in sharing the subject equally between eye and heart, there are 6 instances of eye in this sonnet, but 8 of heart: equal to the number of lines in a 14-line sonnet but an uneven distribution between eye and heart.