Summary:
A short overview of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, in which he describes the many bad traits of a woman he loves and how the love endures even with all those bad traits.
The first line of Sonnet 130 starts off criticizing Shakespeare's mistress. He talks about how empty her eyes are (My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,"). Most men tell women how much their eyes twinkle, but Shakespeare does the opposite of this by using a reverse simile. This anti-simile paints a picture of empty black eyes, such as the coal eyes on a snowman. He then describes the mistress' lips in a similarly negative way. He accomplishes this by describing how colorless her lips are (coral referring to a strong pink to moderate red not the coral in reefs). At this point the visual details have created the face of the mistress. In the third line Shakespeare says how the skin of his mistress is a neutral brown, or dun. By today's standards dun skin is desirable for many people, including myself. Where as in Shakespeare's time it was thought that dark skin made one appear as someone who did manual labor outside all day, in turn white skin was rather fetching. Shakespeare continues to criticize his mistress; line four does this by illustrating her hair as gangly black wires ("If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head."). At this point I picture a bald doll head with a few strands of barbed wire protruding from her scalp. I find crazy hair such as this odd looking and a little frightening. The previous two lines use if-then statements to provide a different manner of conveying the mistress' description. Also these two lines create repetition by using the same structure.
In the next two lines Shakespeare talks about how he has seen beautiful patterned roses of red and white ("I have seen roses damasked, red and white,"), yet the mistress' checks don't look a thing like these roses.
This contrasts how women aspire to have rosy checks, and men view these women as more beautiful. At this point the description of the mistress' physique concludes. One can picture not just the women's face, but also her entire body. The quatrain concludes with Shakespeare criticizing his mistress for her revolting breath. This is evident by his use of the word reek. This description reminds me of a smoker's breath, and how horrible it is. Bad breath is a big turn off for me.
Next Shakespeare tells how he enjoys listening to his mistress' talk even though her voice is nowhere near as pleasing as the sound music. It is as if one is standing right in front of a horrible hag like creature and she opens her mouth to speak, but instead a rancid, shrieking cloud emits from her. This new positive tone toward the mistress continues with Shakespeare saying how he has never seen a goddess on Earth, yet he knows that his mistress only walks on the ground. In other words Shakespeare is saying that his mistress is a mortal, therefore just like every other moral she has flaws.
The sonnet then begins to turn in its attitude toward the mistress. Shakespeare uses the final couplet to say how much he loves this woman even with all her bad traits. He also says how genuine and rare of a love this is, a love just as rare as a perfect woman. The last line finishes with Shakespeare stating how much he dislikes it when poets exaggerate and/or lie about their mistress' beauty in their poems. The visual details in this sonnet add a lot to the sonnet mainly by allowing one to conjure up the image of the mistress. Being able to picture what is going on in a work of literature makes the work much more enjoyable. Who would have ever thought in just fourteen lines someone could create such a vivid picture.
This is the complete article, containing 624 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
