Sonnet 130 Juxtaposition

Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and Pablo Neruda’s “My ugly love” are popularly known to describe beauty in a way hardly anyone would write: through the truth. It’s a common fact that modern lovers and poets speak or write of their beloved with what they and the audience would like to hear, with kind and breathtaking words and verses. Yet, Shakespeare and Neruda, honest men as they both were, chose to write about what love truly is, it matters most what’s on the inside rather than the outside. The theme of true beauty and love are found through Shakespeare and Neruda’s uses of imagery, structure, and tone.

Clyde Saligumba Professor Dr. Glomski HON 121 6 March, 2024 “Dim Lady” and “Sonnet 130”: The Purpose of Unflattering Comparisons Inspiration comes from anywhere. Authors will derive ideas from other spectacular works and incorporate them into their own. Whether it’s to solidify the central idea or completely combat it, authors take other works into consideration. William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” takes a different perspective on love than previous works of the time period.

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…” is a sonnet written by William Shakespeare and is also known as Sonnet 130. He wrote this poem to mock the conventional Petrarchan love sonnets which are about women who have unattainable beauty. This poem is written in the Shakespearean sonnet format which consists of a total 14 lines with the first 12 lines divided into three quatrains, and the last two lines make up a couplet. The quatrains establish the motif or problem of the poem while the ending couplet explains or resolves the previous lines. Sonnet 130 is a long conceit where the speaker of the poem goes through a long list of comparisons that seem like insults. The speaker uses juxtaposition to show that his love for his mistress is strong by describing her in a blunt way that seems insulting on the surface, but he reveals in the end he loves her even though she is flawed.

From this experience, I was able to understand how Shakespeare did not follow the norms of his time. During the 17th century, it was typical for poets to write about their partner and the beauty she possessed. We see poems of love which describe the outward appearance of what was to be considered the perfect woman. Most poets portrayed their female characters similar to a beautiful nature scene, but not William Shakespeare. He talked about beauty as not just being an outward appearance, but something that resides inside.

In life people sometimes face different tribulations that bring them down such as being judged for their physical appearance or even the way they are. Writers in literature who are known to write about romantic things sometimes use this as a way to create things to write about. In sonnet 130, Shakespeare helps us understand that even though his wife has different flaws he still loves her for who she is as a person. Shakespeare uses a critical and judgmental tone to show that even though he compares his mistress to all of these things he still loves her even though her physical appearance isn’t the best.

Unlike Sonnet 18, Shakespeare utterly abandons the poetic convention of Petrarchan conceit in Sonnet 130. In this poem, Shakespeare denies his mistress all of the praises Renaissance poets customarily attributed to their lovers. The first quatrain is filled exclusively with the Shakespeare's seeming insults of his mistress. While Sir Thomas Wyatt authors a poem entitled "Avising the Bright Beams of These Fair Eyes," in the first line of Sonnet 130, Shakespeare affirms that his "mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun." John Wootton, in a poem published in England's Helicon, boasts that his love has "lips like scarlet of the finest dye," but in Sonnet 130 , Shakespeare is sure that his beloved's lips are not nearly quite as red as coral (11; 2). Michael Drayton, in his poem, To His Coy Love, begs his lover, "Show me no more those snowy

The perception of beauty in Shakespeare

As active readers, we often associate love with the benevolent attributes of nature. In accordance, many authors, including William Shakespeare, base a majority of their pieces around this theme due to its credited notoriety amongst their audiences; however, critics argue that the comparisons employed by said authors are often over exaggerated. Shakespeare uses various literary devices such as imagery and similes to both exemplify the concept of love in nature as well as negate it in his poems “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…” and “My mistress’ eyes.”

William Shakespeare conveys the speaker's negative feelings toward his mistress through this anti-love poem by using comparisons. The first example of these comparisons is seen in the opening sentence of the poem through the simile within “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.” This simile sets the tone of mockery seen throughout the passage. Shakespeare also uses sensual descriptions to describe the unsightly way the speaker views his mistress. This can be seen as the speaker describes his mistress as having pale lips, dingy colored flesh, wiry hair, pale cheeks, rotten breath, and an off-putting voice.

William Shakespeare is recognized for being one of greatest poets of all time. His works are still popular to this day. Many of his works included extended metaphors and similes with rhetorical language and were rooted in the nature of love. Two of his poems that are rather alike, but also very contrastive are “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and “My mistresses’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” They both contain a core theme of love or anti-love in some aspects. While these two poems are built around the same type of subject, their interpretations come across in separate ways. In contrast to Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” which is a serious love poem that contains imagery and metaphors, Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” is more negative and humorous but contains imagery and similes.

The title of the poem “My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun” suggests that the speaker is not in love with his ‘mistress’. However, this is not the case. Shakespeare uses figurative language by using criticizing hyperboles to mock the traditional love sonnet. Thus, showing not only that the ideal woman is not always a ‘goddess’, but mocking the way others write about love. Shakespeare proves that love can be written about and accomplished without the artificial and exuberant. The speaker’s tone is ironic, sarcastic, and comical turning the traditional conceit around using satire. The traditional iambic pentameter rhyming scheme of the sonnet makes the diction fall into place as relaxed, truthful, and with elegance in the easy flowing verse. In turn, making this sonnet one of parody and real love.

Shakespeare examines love in two different ways in Sonnets 116 and 130. In the first, love is treated in its most ideal form as an uncompromising force (indeed, as the greatest force in the universe); in the latter sonnet, Shakespeare treats love from a more practical aspect: it is viewed simply and realistically without ornament. Yet both sonnets are justifiable in and of themselves, for neither misrepresents love or speaks of it slightingly. Indeed, Shakespeare illustrates two qualities of love in the two sonnets: its potential and its objectivity. This paper will compare and contrast the two sonnets by Shakespeare and show how they represent two different attitudes to love.

Throughout history, society has flooded young hearts with ideas of beauty and love. It has trained women to believe that in order to be loved and relevant, they must be fit into societal ideals of beauty. The topic of inner beauty is rarely discussed. These societal ideals, while probably quite different in Shakespeare’s day, still existed and served to teach young women that in order to be loved, they must adhere to this idea of beauty. Shakespeare uses a superficially censorious tone in his Sonnet 130 to suggest that true love does not rely on outside beauty.

Within the Petrarchan tradition, a poet would praise the beloved’s superlative qualities using elaborate descriptions of beauty such as “golden hair” or “starry eyes”. Using the blazon, the beloved’s attributes would be depicted through metaphorical comparison or conceits, often to elements of nature. Such comparisons demonstrate that the beloved’s attributes are so sublime that they elevate her to metaphysical proportions – she would seem divine and metaphysical. In “Sonnet 130”, Shakespeare mocks common Petrarchan conceits and rejects describing his beloved using conventional blazon imagery. Instead, Shakespeare portrays his lover in contrast to Petrarchan images of beauty within

“Sonnet 130” written by William Shakespeare, is one of his most well known poems and can be analyzed and broken apart in great depth. The poem is written in fourteen lines which makes it a sonnet. Like all of Shakespeare’s sonnets the meter is iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme for “Sonnet 130” is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. An overlaying theme for “Sonnet 130” is, “True love is based on how beautiful you find someone on the inside.” Shakespeare proves to have a great view on true love in this sonnet. He cares more about what’s on the inside rather than what’s on the outside. “Sonnet 130’s” theme can be proven by Shakespeare's use of poetic and literary devices, the tone and mood of the sonnet, and the motif of true love.