False or indeed “poetical” metaphors, conventional exaggerations about a woman’s beauty, will not do in this case. It implies that the woman is very beautiful indeed, but suggests that it is important for this poet to view the woman he loves realistically. Sonnet 130 is a kind of inverted love poem.
Nonetheless, the poet admires her beauty, suggesting that she is really beautiful, but adamant that he is not going to be drawn into a game of falsely praising that beauty. Her breath is not particularly sweet-smelling (7–8) her voice is normal and not musical (8–9) her walk normal too, not like that of a supernatural goddess. Her cheeks are not as beautiful in colouring as damask roses (5–6). The following lines each turns upside down a customary complement: the woman’s breasts are dull coloured or greyish (“dun”) not, as was proverbial, “as white as snow” (3–4). Shakespeare knows the convention that the woman you love has eyes “brighter or more lovely than the sun”, and he simply denies it in the first line.
#SHIRE OF AN DUN THEINE SERIES#
The sonnet, then, presents us with a series of inversions. Yet he thinks she is really beautiful nonetheless, and his admiration is intended to seem all the more real for being couched in realistic (rather than conventional, exaggerated, or clichéd) terms. Shakespeare insists that the woman he loves is a flesh-and-blood mortal, and no “goddess” (11) (or super-model as we might now say). He is not going to exaggerate (or “belie”, 14) the beauty of the woman he loves in this way. All these stock or clichéd comparisons of Elizabethan love poetry for praising a woman’s beauty are, he implies, unrealistic and silly.
Shakespeare turns all these conventions upside down. Of course, the custom was to say how beautiful and marvellous each feature was. This kind of sonnet would form a list of her beautiful features of face and figure, variously praising her eyes, lips, cheeks, teeth, breasts, etc. It was very customary, following the conventions set up by the Italian lyric poet Petrarch (1304–74), to write sonnets praising the beauty of the woman you were in love with. Sonnet 130 refers to her, even though we do not know her name. Most of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to a young man, but towards the end of the sequence there emerges the so-called “Dark Lady”, a woman with whom he seems to have had an often difficult and unhappy relationship. This is the 130th sonnet in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence of 154 sonnets, published in 1609. You were supposed to be able to recognize a goddess by the way she walked. The word was not used then with our heavily negative sense, but more neutrally.ġ1 go: walk. Damask roses were a sweet-smelling variety popular at the time.Ĩ reeks: is exhaled. The mistress, however, has black and not blonde hair.ĥ damasked: mingled (red and white). Ornamental head-dresses of the period often contained gold wires, so that it was quite normal to compare lush blonde hair with the gold wires in the head-dress above. her eyes are not bright and shining.Ĥ wires: (gold) wires.
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