Because the sonnets continually return to earlier topics and images, undo the precarious stabilities of ostensibly conclusive couplets, regress to emotions which cannot be assuaged and constantly need to be rewritten, they enact a kind of Mobius strip "chicken and egg simultaneity."

Joe Fineman's influential gender-bifurcated reading of the sonnets enlarges this insight through a Lacanian filter that sutures gender and sexuality to signification