Shakespeare Sonnet 130 Essay Example

important Elizabethan sonneteers including Shakespeare have used such conventional metaphors.Spenser in his Amoretti sonnet 9 compares his mistress’s eyes with sun. In the same anthology, in sonnet no 37 he describes his beloved’s hair as golden wires.

Shakespeare in his Venus and Adonis has referred to “sweet coral mouth”. But in this sonnet the poet has very much turned away from the exaggeration which is known as blazon. Instead he presents contreblazon, a denial of ornamentation against common beauty. The poet also makes it clear that she is not only plain looking but she also prefers to remain plain. “I have seen roses damasked, red and white But no such roses see I in her cheeks”.The damasked rose is a mingling of red and white making a pink colour.

The poet probably means that his beloved does not show any pinkish blush because she is dark. There is an implied idea of her cheeks being rough. The image suggests silk damasked cloth having embroidered red and white roses. But such softness cannot be felt in her cheeks. Equally the poet registers other merits of her by dissociating her from conventions. She does not smell sweet perfume; rather she emits foul sweat.

The poet admits that her words do not sound like music.The poet confesses: “I grant I never saw a goddess go- My mistress when she walks treads on the ground” It is to be noted that Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis writes “The grass stoops not, she treads on it so light”. The poet here very consciously reverses the earlier idealization by a different treatment. He knows that her physical charm is devoid of sensuality.

She may not appeal to his sexuality either by her perfumed closeness or by her voice. She rather becomes repulsive by her foul smell, possible dry voice and a very masculine style of walking.

The poet has used extensively the senses to justify her very ordinariness.The sight comes with words like sun, coral, snow and damasked rose. The sense of touch comes with the words ‘roses damasked’. Smell and sound come with her smell and voice. Thus the poet very elaborately describes her original beauty and nature.

Another important idea about this sonnet is that the poet has established a new tradition by accepting the truth against hyperbolic comparisons. True love demands a faithful realization of emotion which is not related to physical beauty. Physical beauty fades with time. But a true understanding of the mind needs no falsity.

In Shakespeare’s another important sonnet no 116, the poet writes “Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments” Here the similar idea is also echoed at the concluding couplet “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare” Any beauty described untruthfully through mendacious, improper, artificial comparisons is an insult to true love because love is a spiritual idea and not recognition of false beauty. The poet feels that even if his beloved lacks conventional beauty she is rare to him and so he cannot find any appropriate comparison for her.Similarly her plain beauty is so fulfilling that the lover never feels tempted for any other beauty. Thus the sonnet 130 is an example of an unconventional love poem. It is a sort of defamiliarization by

which the poet successfully rejects old convention and yet presents his beloved as rare beauty.

It can also be said that Shakespeare very cleverly introduces another convention of poetry in which the lover catalogues his beloved’s demerits in such a way that even those demerits look like exceptional virtue of a woman.