From the start Sonnet 130 or as we like to call it “My Mistress’ Eyes,” is a somewhat gruesome tribute to Shakespeare’s mistress. She 's clearly the main character of the poem. Every single line refers to her, whether describing her appearance or her smell or even just the way she walks. As the audience we get to learn a few things about her, like the color of her hair and her skin. Overall, though, she 's a little more like an idea or figment of Shakespeare’s imagination, than a real person. Instead of being a fully drawn character like Hamlet or Juliet other characters of his, she is mostly here to give the poet, Shakespeare, a chance to poke fun at exaggerated love poetry. We hear lots about her, but for the most part, the information is …show more content…
They, too, seem to be among the standard list of things you 're supposed to notice in a beautiful woman. When you meet someone lips are another feature that you sometimes notice because they can either be amazing or horrifying. For example, think about a gorgeous movie star. If there is a close-up for a scene, the camera will focus on specific features, like her skin, hair, eyes, breasts, etc. all of which Shakespeare includes here. Again in line 2, he compares her lips to red coral giving the readers another ridiculous and over-the-top simile. Why? Because lips that red would obviously have to be painted on, and that 's the kind of fake beauty that this poem is pointing …show more content…
In many ways you can see why talking about this woman 's breasts forces us to really think about how we define our ideal woman and what makes her beautiful. For example, in line 3 we see that Shakespeare avoids a direct simile. He just gives us the strong image of sparkling white snow, and lays it next to the equally strong image of dun, or grayish-brown, breasts. He gets us thinking about our colors and what we want to see on a woman. White is the symbol of purity, cleanliness, virginity, etc. and to put all those next to what Shakespeare says about his mistress’ breasts being dun makes them seem dirty and disgusting. Another piece Shakespeare analyzes is his mistress’ hair. A major cliché today about women 's beauty is their hair. Men assume that it should be silky and smooth and sometimes even shiny. Shakespeare ends up turning this assumption on its head in this poem. Back in Shakespeare’s time, the readers might have recognized all these worn-out similes as allusions or references to images in other love poems. For example, the image of hair as black as wires sprouting out of her head might be meant to gross the audience out. It almost sounds like Shakespeare is referencing a creepy
These women are sexualized, audacious, respectful, and flirtatious. Women in the Elizabethan society were considered the weaker sex and in need of always being protected. Women, however, were allowed many freedoms in Shakespeare writings. The thinking from both plays was that women were not above men but more like sex objects and a necessary part of society. Women have evolved into so much more, however, I would like to think this is from the open-mindedness of how Shakespeare saw each woman.
The imagery, shown in both Shakespeare and Neruda’s poems, contain similarities between negative and positive imagery. To start off, Neruda’s poem is constantly interchanging between negative and positive verses. For example, the first quatrain of Neruda’s poem entirely depicts the mentioned juxtaposition with “My ugly, you’re a messy chestnut./ My beauty, you are pretty as the wind./ Ugly: your mouth is big enough for two mouths./ Beauty: your kisses are as fresh as melons.” This example uses two different types of poetic devices: metaphor and simile. Here, the metaphors are used to describe the ugly, while on the other hand, the simile is used to describe beauty. These two devices add to the understanding that the metaphors for the ugly are meant to make readers realize an over exaggerated view of the speaker’s reality in regards to his lover, and the similes for the beauty are meant for readers to show how the speaker really sees love. In contrast, Shakespeare’s sonnet contains twice as much negative imagery; however, there is h...
For the duration of the play, Shakespeare uses similes to create imagery for the reader. “Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like
To understand these two sonnets completely, one must first have a little background information concerning the sequence of the Sonnets and William Shakespeare's life. Shakespeare's series of Sonnets can be divided, "into two sections, the first (numbers 1-126) being written to or about a young man, and most of those in the second (numbers 127-154) being written to or about a dark woman" (Wilson 17-8). Because of the autobiographical nature of Shakespeare's Sonnets, these two characters are people from Shakespeare's actual life. The young man is Shakespeare's patron and Shakespeare has a "humble and selfless adoration [that] he feels for his young friend" (Wilson 32). The dark woman is Shakespeare's lover, a woman that infatuates him. These two people provide an emotional contrast for each other and Shakespeare's views on love. When these two meet, they have an affair, "behavior that, as the Poet [Shakespeare] is really deeply in love with the woman, causes him such distress, at times agony, as to introduce a note of tragedy into the series [of sonnets], . . ." (Wilson 33). The affair between the young man and the dark woman is the catalyst for Shakespeare's au...
Lust and Love in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 and Campion’s There is a Garden in Her Face
This is an enjoyable sonnet that uses nature imagery, found extensively in Petrarca, that Shakespeare uses to get his point across. Not much explication is needed, aside the sustained images of nature, to fully understand its intent, but I would like to point out a peculiar allusion. When reading line 3, "the violet past prime" has made me think of Venus and Adonis. In the end, Adonis melts into the earth and a violet sprouts where his body was, which Venus then places in her heart, signifying the love she has for him. Reading this into the poem makes the few following lines more significant. Having Adonis portrayed as the handsome youth, Shakespeare is alluding to the death of youth (in general and to the young man) through the sonnet. In the next line, it is not certain if "sable" is an adjective or a noun and if "curls" is a noun, referring to hair (which is plausible) or a verb modifying "sable." Invoking the allusion to Adonis here, Shakespeare portends that if Adonis did live longer, he too would have greying hair; thus, Shakespeare sees ["behold"] an Adonis figure, the young man, past his youth.
"My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun" uses comparisons to express Shakespeare's idea of love as opposed to lust. A lustful man would focus on a woman's pleasing physical characteristics, such as white breasts, beautiful hair, red lips, and fragrant breath; however, Shakespeare's mistress possesses none of these great characteristics. Shakespeare, instead, uses metaphors to express her physical shortcomings. "Coral is far more red than her lips' red" (line 2) describes his mistress' faded lips. "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head" (line 4) shows the coarse, unkempt and dark color of her hair. "
Germinating in anonymous Middle English lyrics, the subversion of the classical poetic representation of feminine beauty as fair-haired and blue-eyed took on new meaning in the age of exploration under sonneteers Sidney and Shakespeare. No longer did the brown hair of "Alison" only serve to distinguish her from the pack; the features of the new "Dark Lady" became more pronounced and sullied, and her eroticized associations with the foreignness of the New World grew more explicit through conceits of colonization. However, the evolving dichotomy between fairness and darkness was not quite so revolutionary; in fact, Sidney and Shakespeare lauded the virtues of fairness with the same degree of passion as their predecessors, albeit in a cloaked form. To counter their mistresses' exterior darkness, the poets locate an interior lightness that radiates beyond the funereal veil of hair or eyes‹raven-hair or jet-eyes is acceptable only if there is an innate brightness that illuminates the sensuality of the superficial.
That means, the approaches of poet’s love remain the same. In one place, he portrays beauty as conveying a great responsibility in the sonnets addressed to the young man. The poet has experienced what he thinks of as "the marriage of true minds," also known as true love, that his love remains strong, and that he believes that it’s eternal. Nothing will stop their love, as in the symbols like all the ships, stars and stormy seas that fill the landscape of the poem and so on what can affect to their love. The poet is too much attracted with the young man’s beauty, though this indicates to something really bad behavior. But in another place, Shakespeare makes fun of the dark lady in sonnet 130. He explains that his lover, the dark lady, has wires for hair, bad breath, dull cleavage, a heavy step, pale lips and so on, but to him, real love is, the sonnet implies, begins when we accept our lovers for what they are as well as what they are not. But other critics may not agree with this and to them, beauty may define to something
Instead, she spends most of the passage claiming that she cannot believe he has done something like this because of his good looks, showing the reader that she does not care for his personality and is instead only with him due to her arousing sexual desires. This shows how the sexual imagery has already become much more overt in the play itself, further developing the idea that Shakespeare wanted to ease the audience into the sexual nature of the play instead of putting it all in straight away. This kind of sexual imagery was strange for the time that the play was written as women were not seen to have sexual desires, especially not young girls, and this would have made the play controversial for the time as the audience would have felt uncomfortable that something so unheard of was happening. However, the idea itself is embedded as a subtext rather than an idea that is made evident throughout the scene, furthering the idea that the sexual imagery is more concealed than it would have been had the play been written in the modern
The speaker uses metaphors to describe his mistress’ eyes to being like the sun; her lips being red as coral; cheeks like roses; breast white as snow; and her voices sounding like music. In the first few lines of the sonnet, the speaker view and tells of his mistress as being ugly, as if he was not attracted to her. He give...
It shows each women's personality while dealing with their situations. Throw your vile guesses in the devil’s teeth, from whence you have them. You are jealous now that this is from some mistress, some remembrance: no, in good troth, Bianca. ”(Shakespeare 3.4.184-187). The men would speak to the women in very demanding tones.
Both Sonnets have different styles. Sonnet 18 is a much more traditional poem, showing the reader a picture of his muse in the most divine way. Shakespeare uses a complex metaphor of comparing his subject to the summer, but at the same time making it easy to understand. The poet goes as traditional as possible; his friend surpasses the beauty of summer, as summer will fade and turn to winter. Sonnet 130 is just as easy to understand as the former. The use of straightforward comparisons that go from line to line, instead of one metaphor elaborated through the entire poem, makes this sonnet quite different in style. Sonnet 130, in contradiction to Sonnet 18, purposefully branches off from the traditional romantic love poem for he does not describe the subject as a true beauty but as his true love.
This poem speaks of a love that is truer than denoting a woman's physical perfection or her "angelic voice." As those traits are all ones that will fade with time, Shakespeare exclaims his true love by revealing her personality traits that caused his love. Shakespeare suggests that the eyes of the woman he loves are not twinkling like the sun: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" (1). Her hair is compared to a wire: "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head" (3). These negative comparisons may sound almost unloving, however, Shakespeare proves that the mistress outdistances any goddess. This shows that the poet appreciates her human beauties unlike a Petrarchan sonnet that stresses a woman's cheek as red a rose or her face white as snow. Straying away from the dazzling rhetoric, this Shakespearean poem projects a humane and friendly impression and elicits laughter while expressing a truer love. A Petrarchan sonnet states that love must never change; this poem offers a more genuine expression of love by describing a natural woman.
In William Shakespeare’s sonnet “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” the audience is introduced to a poem in which he himself goes into depth about the person he is infatuated with. The author does not give any type of hints telling the audience who the poem is towards because it can be for both male and female. That’s the interesting part about William Shakespeare’s work which is to second hand guess yourself and thinking otherwise. Making you think and think rational when you read his work. The sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summers day” is one of his most famous and published poem. Shakespeare’s tone of voice at the commence of the poem is somewhat relaxed and joyful because he is going on talking about the person he is intrigued by. Throughout the passage Metaphors, similes and imagery can all be found in the poem itself