My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun is the first line of Sonnet 130 by the great English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s sonnets were printed in 1609, when the poet was already a well-established playwright. The dates of the poems are unknown. Shakespeare probably wrote the sonnets over a period of years. Shakespeare wrote a sequence of 154 sonnets, though some scholars believe that a different author may have written Sonnets 153 and 154, those focused on Cupid, the Roman god of love. Only two of the sonnets appeared before 1609, in a book of poetry called The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). See Shakespeare, William.
Loading the player...Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare
Like almost all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sonnet 130 consists of three quatrains (four-line units) followed by a concluding couplet (two-line unit). Each quatrain has a rhyme scheme of abab, cdcd, efef, with the final couplet a rhyming one (gg).
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.
In this sonnet, Shakespeare challenges the conventions of the traditional love sonnet. In particular, he inverts the practice of extravagantly praising a lady through exaggerated comparison and metaphor. Where the reader expects a catalog of compliments, Shakespeare wittily provides the opposite. His mistress’s eyes are not like the sun (many poets had already claimed their mistresses’ were). Her breasts are not the usual “snow-white,” but are “dun” (dull beige). If other poets compare golden tresses to “wire,” or spun gold, then his dark-haired mistress must have “black wires” on her head. Roses in nature might be “damasked,” or dappled. But the poet claims, such roses are not really in a woman’s cheeks. And his mistress’s breath cannot compare with some perfumes. (“Reek” in line 8 simply indicates a smell, without the modern meaning of a strong, unpleasant smell.)
This sonnet belongs to a group of sonnets in the sequence (numbers 127 to 154) known as the “dark lady” sonnets. They are addressed to, or are concerned with, an unknown mistress. Many of the dark lady sonnets express bitterness or resentment about their relationship. But the tone of Sonnet 130 is light-hearted, with a sense of sincere tribute behind its rejection of elaborate metaphor, or “false compare.”
In the third quatrain, the speaker utters his first true compliment: “I love to hear her speak.” Yet he follows this with the admission that music has a more pleasing sound. Similarly, his mistress simply “treads on the ground,” so she is not a goddess. But in such plain truth lies more honest love, this sonnet suggests. Lovers are deceitful when they use elegant flattery to seem virtuous. And those who are misrepresented or misled by “false compare” do not benefit from the praises and are victims of those who sing their extravagant praise.
For more information about Shakespeare’s sonnets, see Shakespeare, William (Shakespeare’s poems). See also English literature (Elizabethan poetry); Poetry (Forms) (Renaissance poetry).
