Precious Works

A General view on Shakespeare's Sonnet No.130

Shakespeare, Source:Wikipedia

In this sonnet Shakespeare expresses in an unconventional style. The poet like every passionate lover in this world believes his mistress to be a most beautiful woman, though he knows what are the proper necessities of beauty and also knows that his mistress has the lack of necessary qualities to be beautiful. 

Shakespeare describes the essential things in a lady to be a beautiful women in the whole sonnet. Only the couplet is rest in which the poet gives the proper notion of lover or himself. This couplet is result and a characteristic in all Shakespeare's sonnets. Poet here suggests most significant comparison between his beloved and worldly pleasures (nature). He compares the eyes with the sun, the redness of the lips with the coral, the whiteness of the breast with snow; cheeks with the roses (damasked) and the breath with the perfume, and much more pleasure he wants in his mistress; but his mistress has not the eyes like the sun, her lips are not red like coral, her breast is not white like snow but dark, her hairs are not wire-like, not any damasked rose is shown in the cheeks of her mistress and  her breath is not well-perfumed. The poet knows that music is better than her sound but he wants only to hear his mistress speaking because of his love to her. 

Now Shakespeare in his couplet expresses a lover's thought  and idea about his beloved that his beloved is extraordinarily beautiful, as beautiful as any woman who was depicted as an exceptional woman by the use of false comparison. 

Elizabethan Idealism

Shakespeare in this sonnet accepts the style of Elizabethan idealism. We find such like descriptions in Spenser and Sidney etc. also. The comparison in this sonnet is very interesting. The comparison of eyes with the sun is the most significant to think the difference between the western and eastern literature. Sun is the symbol of brightness and dazzling and dazzles the eyes of a person who watch it and like the sun the eyes also are very dazzling and hot to the western writers. Surely brightness of the eyes is beautiful and important but in the sun-like eyes the softness and the drop of tears are absent, and this very softness and the drop of tears much strike the eastern or Indian poet. For Indian poet eyes are the the mirror in which he watches all his sorrow and his happiness, all his love and his hate and whole the sentences of the heart which does not join the tongue. Indian poet 'Agyey' says to his beloved's eyes- 

"तुम्हारे नैन
पहले भोर की दो ओस बूँदे हैं
अछूती, ज्योतिर्मय
भीतर द्रवित..."
(Your eyes are two dew-drops from sky of the opening dawn- unsmashed, brightened and inwardly soaked....")

Another comparison of hair and wire is most common and significant in English literature and it occurs over and over again. 'Spenser' wrote in 'Epithalamion'- 

"Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre"

and Sestiad in 'Hero and Leander'-

"Her tresses were of wire
knit like a net". 

Thus in this sonnet Shakespeare finds his mistress wanting in all those attractions which are associated with beauty; and yet he thinks her to be the most beautiful woman in the world. So it is clearly proved that beauty lies in the beholder's eyes. 

This sonnet may contain genuine praise by Shakespeare to his mistress in the days when she was really in love with him, or it may be a satirical note on that woman when she had proved disloyal to him by changing her passion to another man from the poet. What the exact state of mind Shakespeare applies here is unsure,but after all this sonnet is great exercise on expression and description of praiseworthy beauty.

Other Articles on Shakespearean Sonnets:

• Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Shakespeare, Source:Wikipedia

In this fine sonnet Shakespeare glorifies the beauty of his friend. His friends' beauty is incomparable, distinct and more lovely. In the beginning the poet arises a question, would it be appropriate to compare his beauty to the beauty of a summer's day and the answer is 'no and never'. You are more lovable and soothing. The winds 'shake the darling buds of May' but the duration of this summer month is much short. And as the same all the things of the world is to be destroyed by the chance or by the chance or by the nature's course. The sun gets the brightness in the summer's day, but after sometimes sun becomes light-less and the brightness of the sun becomes dim. Shakespeare gives here a universal theme that 'Time is the most powerful' and no one can take the defense against Time's attack, he says-

Shakespeare in this sonnet immortalizes his friend's beauty. He says, 'your beauty is eternal and it never can fade. Your eternal summer is not to be destroyed and you never can lose your possession of this fair beauty. Your beauty's sun is not to be dimmed and the brightness of the sun is everlasting. Spenser gets the same idea in his sonnet No. IX - 

and like this the beauty of the poet's friend is as rare, and as lighted as no other beauty can resemble. 

Shakespeare says that even death will not be able to touch his beauty away because of my eternal lines (sonnets) that will increase his beauty. Shakespeare is a conscious writer of his exceptional gifts as a poet and these lines show that consciousness. And not only Shakespeare,but all the contemporaries of his age have had like anticipation of immortality for their verse. Drayton speaks,

Shakespeare sounds that as long as men can breath and 'As long as the eyes can see' so long would my sonnets continue to read, and by the immortality of these rhymes, his friend also must will remain immortal. To indicate these lines W.Knight has a remarkable remark,