My Mistress Eyes Are Nothing Like The Sun Sonnet 130 Summary

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Madison Hataway
Professor Schuder
English 102
23 September 2016

“My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)”

When you think of a love poem, you usually think of something sappy like you would find in an anniversary card or even a Valentine’s Day card. The kind of poems that make you squirm when you read it if you’re single, like me. What about if I asked you about poems written hundreds of years ago? You would think they would be even sappier than today’s poems. Well, the speaker of “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)” had a different idea. The speaker uses this sonnet to joke around with a variety of exaggerated comparisons some poets back then wrote about when talking about their beloved. In the poem “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)”, William Shakespeare develops a parody of conventional love through tone, imagery, and symbolism. In Sonnet 130, the Shakespeare uses a mocking and verbal irony tone. The title and …show more content…

The speaker says that perfume has a more pleasurable smell than the breath she “reeks” (8) to give us a strong sense of imagery and let us know how far from an ideal woman she is. The first part of the poem is full of imagery like “Coral is far more red than her lips’ red” (2), giving us the image of her lips not being in any comparison to red coral lips like most “goddesses” had back then. In the following lines, he goes on with more examples of her imperfect features like her hair being “black wires” (4) and her “breasts are dun” (3). These two imagery examples are the worst, comparing her hair to be frizzy and her breasts to be dun just like the speaker comparing her skin to a grayish color. The speaker continues to let the readers know that she is no comparison to beautiful things like the delightful perfume, the redness of coral, luxurious hair, or snow white skin and

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