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Analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130
works; in the Rape of Lucrece he uses “Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin“, in The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio says: "Tranio, I saw her coral lips to move, And with her breath she did perfume the air." He doesn’t hesitate to liken eyes to sun and stars. In the sonnet 49 there is the line: „And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye“, in the famous monologue, Romeo compares Juliet’s eyes to „the brightest stars in all the heaven“ and eventually, Shakespeare contradicts himself in sonnet 132, when, speaking about the very same eyes he proclaimed to be „nothing like the sun“, he writes:
And truly not the morning sun of heaven Better becomes the grey cheeks of the east,
Nor that full star that ushers in the even
Doth half that glory to the sober west
As those two mourning eyes become thy face.
To reveal the purpose of rejecting these conventions, we have to look closely at the sonnets as a whole and find the relations between them. When we read the group of sonnets addressed to the Dark Lady we discover one recurring theme - the contradiction between the real look of the lady and poet’s eyes, blinded by love, that see her in a different way.
This conflict is described in the sonnets 137:
Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold, and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
And 148:
Oh me, what eyes hath Love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight!
Or if they have, where is my judgment fled,
That censures falsely what they see aright?
If that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,
What means the world to say it is not so?
If it be not, then love doth well denote
Love's eye is not so true as all men's. No,
How can it? Oh, how can Love's eye be true,
That is so vexed with watching and with tears?
I think the sonnet 130 can be explained not only as a parody, but also as an attempt to cope with this problem of inner conflict. The Petrarchan conventions here serve the purpose of contrasting the actual look of “Dark Lady“ with the contemporary ideal beauty. The poet is well aware of the fact that his mistress is far from being beautiful in the conventional way and he wants to know what is it that attracts him to her. So he takes each particular feature and poses himself a question: Do the eyes of my mistress resemble sun? - And he has to answer that, honestly, they do not. Are her lips redder than any coral stone? No, in fact, any coral stone is redder than her lips. He continues in this matter-of-fact tone and every answer is negative. Her hair is black, so it cannot be compared to gold, and she has dark complexion, which is really far from being snowy white. Nor are there any roses blooming in her [next page]