Sonnet 130 Explication

Paper 1-Literary Explication

When one thinks of a sonnet about love, one thinks of beautiful description of the speaker’s lover or a lovely illustration about love in a general sense. Love poems contains emphasis on emotional and imaginative spontaneity as oppose to “Sonnet 130” that compares the speaker’s lover in a decretory sense. In “Sonnet 130- My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun..." by William Shakespeare is a parody of love poetry; love is not always like it is presented in other contemporize poems. Someone doesn’t need to be beautiful to be loved. Shakespeare contradicts the exaggerated comparisons some poets of his days made about their lovers.

The parody of this sonnet starts with the writer using the traditional English

Instead of being a fully developed character like Hamlet or Juliet, she is mostly to give a chance to poke at a cliché love poem. The descriptions about her are vague and negative like in line one “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”. The speaker refuses to compare his lover's eyes to the sun. He then picks an exaggerated simile so that one can see just how absurd this kind of comparison can be. In line eight, the speaker uses the word "reeks" conveying a strong image of how non-perfect this woman is. In line 11, the speaker uses the words "grant…goddess" creating a hyperbole, the speaker then illustrates two portrayals, one of an ideal woman, and the other is of the real, imperfect woman the speaker has been describing all along. In these last lines the speaker chooses the real woman over the goddess usually portray in other poems. In “Coral is far more red than her lips’ red” (line 2) the speaker compares his mistress’s lips to red coral giving us another example of an over-the-top simile. For lips to be red they would have to be painted, and that's the kind of false image of beauty that this poem is pushing back