My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the
sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my
love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Summary: Sonnet 130
This sonnet compares the speaker’s lover to a number of
other beauties—and never in the lover’s favor. Her eyes are “nothing
like the sun,” her lips are less red than coral; compared to white
snow, her breasts are dun-colored, and her hairs are like black
wires on her head. In the second quatrain, the speaker says he has
seen roses separated by color (“damasked”) into red and white, but
he sees no such roses in his mistress’s cheeks; and he says the
breath that “reeks” from his mistress is less delightful than perfume.
In the third quatrain, he admits that, though he loves her voice,
music “hath a far more pleasing sound,” and that, though he has
never seen a goddess, his mistress—unlike goddesses—walks on the
ground. In the couplet, however, the speaker declares that, “by
heav’n,” he thinks his love as rare and valuable “As any she belied
with false compare”—that is, any love in which false comparisons
were invoked to describe the loved one’s beauty.
Read a translation of
Sonnet 130 →
Commentary
This sonnet, one of Shakespeare’s most famous, plays an
elaborate joke on the conventions of love poetry common to Shakespeare’s
day, and it is so well-conceived that the joke remains funny today.
Most sonnet sequences in Elizabethan England were modeled after
that of Petrarch. Petrarch’s famous sonnet sequence was written
as a series of love poems to an idealized and idolized mistress
named Laura. In the sonnets, Petrarch praises her beauty, her worth,
and her perfection using an extraordinary variety of metaphors based largely
on natural beauties. In Shakespeare’s day, these metaphors had already
become cliche (as, indeed, they still are today), but they were
still the accepted technique for writing love poetry. The result
was that poems tended to make highly idealizing comparisons between
nature and the poets’ lover that were, if taken literally, completely
ridiculous. My mistress’ eyes are like the sun; her lips are red
as coral; her cheeks are like roses, her breasts are white as snow,
her voice is like music, she is a goddess.
In many ways, Shakespeare’s
sonnets subvert and reverse the conventions of the Petrarchan love
sequence: the idealizing love poems, for instance, are written not
to a perfect woman but to an admittedly imperfect man, and the love poems
to the dark lady are anything but idealizing (“My love is as a fever,
longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease” is hardly
a Petrarchan conceit.) Sonnet 130 mocks
the typical Petrarchan metaphors by presenting a speaker who seems
to take them at face value, and somewhat bemusedly, decides to tell
the truth. Your mistress’ eyes are like the sun? That’s strange—my
mistress’ eyes aren’t at all like the sun. Your mistress’ breath
smells like perfume? My mistress’ breath reeks compared to perfume.
In the couplet, then, the speaker shows his full intent, which is
to insist that love does not need these conceits in order to be
real; and women do not need to look like flowers or the sun in order
to be beautiful.
The rhetorical structure of Sonnet 130 is
important to its effect. In the first quatrain, the speaker spends one
line on each comparison between his mistress and something else
(the sun, coral, snow, and wires—the one positive thing in the whole
poem some part of his mistress is like. In the
second and third quatrains, he expands the descriptions to occupy
two lines each, so that roses/cheeks, perfume/breath, music/voice,
and goddess/mistress each receive a pair of unrhymed lines. This
creates the effect of an expanding and developing argument, and
neatly prevents the poem—which does, after all, rely on a single
kind of joke for its first twelve lines—from becoming stagnant.
