Beauty in the Eye of a Poet

In his "Sonnet 130," William Shakespeare presents an uncommon variation on the staple Elizabethan era love poem. While sonnets on the subject of love typically presented a problem which would be solved through the poet 's skills of rhetoric, in "Sonnet 130" Shakespeare creates a unique satirical love poem which eschews the common idealistic comparisons on a woman 's beauty in favor of a photographic accuracy. The poem 's final rhyming couplet makes it clear that the author 's intentions are to depict realistic and not idealistic beauty. While it would be a basic interpretation to read the "mistress" in the sonnet as the author 's lover, a closer analysis reveals a more unorthodox possibility. Instead of interpreting the sonnet as a standard

Shakespeare’s syntax and organization of his lines helps assert the importance of specific phrases in the work. By placing “hast thou” (2) on the beginning of the second line, the author changes the emphasis of the line that precedes it: “A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted” (1). Choosing not to start with a direct address to his subject, Shakespeare introduces a comparison before revealing the subject. This syntactic choice highlights the “woman’s face” (1) rather than the subject and allows “Hast thou”(2) to act as a transition from the feminine analogy to the masculine subject. The word order of the first line emphasizes the “woman’s face” (1), with the personification of nature following. I interpret this personification of nature in two ways, the first refers to the subject’s natural beauty without any makeup, while the second implies that the nature goddess painted the man’s face herself. Because of the word order and choice, the poem initiates an air of ambiguity that continues throughout the sonnet. At the end of the first quatrain, the writer uses enjambment in order to intensify and visually replicate a phrase.

In our class we have been discussing sonnet cxxx. Many of my classmates believe that Shakespeare was saying that, although this girl is ugly, he still loves her. While others claim that he was not making any statements about her looks, but instead being realistic. It is my view that he was making a point of claiming that his girlfriend was a regular person and not a mythological goddess.

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”- Kahlil Gibran. I am going to compare and contrast between “Sonnet 130”, by William Shakespeare and “The Harlem Dancer”, by Claude McKay. Both poems and sonnets are English and have fourteen lines or stanzas, and the rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG, which points out beauty in women.

In Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, the speaker ponders the beauty, or the lack thereof, of his lover. Throughout the sonnet, the speaker presents his lover as an unattractive mistress with displeasing features, but in fact, the speaker is ridiculing, through the use of vivid imagery, the conventions of love poems and the way woman are portrayed through the use of false comparisons. In the end, the speaker argues that his mistress may not be perfect, but in his eyes, her beauty is equal to any woman who is abundantly admired and put through the untrue comparison.

In the Sonnets, William Shakespeare expresses the different types of love between a young man and a dark lady. His sonnets briefly describe the importance of love, beauty, and the ravages of time. There are different figures of speech used throughout the sonnets such as, metaphor (an implicit or implied comparison between two things that have common characteristics between one another). In the introductory sonnets, Shakespeare portrays beauty to the young man and urges him to have children, so his beauty can be immortal. This leads to carrying on one’s beauty to leave a memory of an image. However, Shakespeare’s main focus was on the three themes: beauty, love, and the passing time; this demonstrates the importance of beauty from one person to another, by not letting beauty burn itself out through the passing time comes.

In fact, the contrasting strategies of Sonnet 29 and extreme claims made in Sonnet 116 combine in a intellectual manner throughout Sonnet 130. The speaker of this sonnet incorporates numerous ironic contrasts with his love’s beauty and a few unattainable measures (SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS). Unlike in previous sonnet the author does not directly state the true beauty of his love, however he expresses what she is

Sonnet Twenty opens with the line “A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted.” This leaves us with the impression that the narrator, an unidentified young man, perhaps even Shakespeare himself, is describing a beautiful young woman. A woman so beautiful, in fact, that she has no use for cosmetics, because Nature personally took time to craft her. Nature is an artist and the object of our narrator’s affection, which the reader originally believes to be a woman, is her work of art, her canvas, so to speak. Continuing from this is the second line, “Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion”. This line contains our, antithesis—“master-mistress”—in that the pair of words are complete opposites. These titles of ranks suggest that the woman simply mesmerizes our narrator. She is the object of his love and sexual desire. In fact, the word “mistress” suggests that our narrator may be participating in infidel...

Sonnet 130 openly mocks the traditional love sonnets of the time. This is, perhaps, made most apparent through the use of subversive comparisons and exaggerated similes. The intention of a subversive comparison is to mimic a traditional comparison yet highlight the opposite purpose. Whereas his contemporaries would compare their love’s beauty to alabaster or pearls, Shakespeare notes, “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun” (3), therefore intentionally downplaying the beauty of his mistress. Later he states, “...in some perfumes there is more delight / than in the breath that from my mistress reeks” (7-8). Both of these exemplify that Shakespeare ridicules the traditional love sonnet by employing the same imagery to convey opposite intentions.

In “Sonnet 18” the very first line is a simile: “Shall I compare thee to a summer 's day.” He is comparing a summer day to the beauty of his lover. There is also metaphor in this poem, when Shakespeare says “thy eternal summer shall not fade." He is saying the she will always look young to him and is comparing eternal summer to the girl.. Another device used in this sonnet is imagery. Throughout the sonnet, he uses imagery with the way he describes the summer day and the way he describes the woman’s beauty. For example, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” “Sonnet 130” also has similes and metaphors. “My mistress ' eyes are nothing like the sun,” is an example of a metaphor. The sun is being compared to the girl’s eyes. In “Sonnet 130” there is also imagery, but it is defined in a different way. In this sonnet, imagery is through negative thoughts and words. He says “My mistress ' eyes are nothing like the sun” and that “Coral is far more red than her lips ' red.” He is comparing coral to his ladies lips. In these two sonnets, imagery is used similarly since both show how beautiful the woman is, in each separate poem. However, imagery in Sonnet 130 explains that beauty is not everything due to his women being not as beautiful as the one in Sonnet 18, but still loving her. While in Sonnet 18, the imagery shows that his women is more beautiful than a “Summer’s day,” and that her beauty will last