Traditional Blazon Sonnet In Shakespeare's My Mistress Eyes

The saying that love is blind, is one that is very wrong. Love is not blind, it is merely a faint line that many individuals chose not to see. During Shakespeare’s time, the societal norms that cultivated women were very precise. Women were held to high standards to both look and act in specific ways, but did society ever take it too far? Many poets during Shakespeare’s time wrote traditional blazon sonnets, ones that compared women to the most wondrous things life has to offer; gems, jewels, plants, and stars. Such beautiful comparisons were made and the women appeared so divine but they were unrealistic. Women had become a collection of objects rather than human, but Shakespeare shed some light on the matter at hand and presented a new way of thinking. In Shakespeare’s My Mistress’ Eyes, he purposefully contradicts the typical blazon tradition, uses enjambment, end-stop, and rhyme schemes to create a sonnet which serves as a statement that disowns the societal views on women.

The poem can be considered a blazon traditional sonnet although it presents the tradition in an unconventional way. The typical way a blazon sonnet presents itself is through the broken-down description of a woman’s qualities. Women are usually highly praised and they are made to appear so out of reach; they become unobtainable even by the poet themselves. Women are portrayed as a collection of objects rather than human which accentuates the idea that they are so unattainable because no woman like them actually exist. The idea that beauty is what defines, and what controls a man’s love for a woman, is not depicted in Shakespeare’s sonnet, My Mistress’ Eyes. In fact, Shakespeare takes a completely new twist on the tradition, one that many individuals find insulting, while the rest find