Sonnet 130: My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun
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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. |
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My mistress' eyes are nothing like the Sun,
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The eyes of my mistress are not at all like the Sun.
Shakespeare sets off on a list of poetic commonplaces that exhort standards of beauty which his mistress – in contrast, apparently, to others – simply does not meet, and so an emphasis certainly here is on 'my' mistress, as opposed to the mistresses of other poets. The idea that an admired person's eyes are suns or like the Sun is, by the time Shakespeare comes to write his sonnets, a well-established trope. Samuel Daniel, in his sonnet cycle Delia, published in 1592, writes of "thine eye's bright sun" (31.7), and a man writing under the pseudonym R. L. Gentleman, generally identified as Richard Linche, in Sonnet 3 of his collection entitled Diella, Certain Sonnets, offers a description of his lady that also both resembles and contrasts Shakespeare's of his: Swift-footed Time, look back, and here mark well Those rare-shaped parts my pen shall now declare! My mistress' snow-white skin doth much excel The pure-soft wool Arcadian sheep do bear; Her hair exceeds gold forced in smallest wire, In smaller threads than those Arachne spun; Her eyes are crystal fountains, yet dart fire, More glorious to behold than midday sun; Her ivory front, though soft as purest silk, Looks like the table of Olympic Jove, Her cheeks are like ripe cherries laid in milk, Her alabaster neck the throne of Love; Her other parts so far excel the rest, That wanting words, they cannot be expressed. And William Shakespeare himself deploys the comparison in Sonnet 49, when he anticipates a time when his young man will no longer be able or allowed to love him: Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye, all of which is to say nothing so much as that William Shakespeare's reader or listener at the time would have readily recognised the notion of an admired person's eyes being like the sun to their lover and poet, and thus this poem immediately acquires a note of knowing irony, so as not to say mild sarcasm. |
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Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
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The line doesn't need translating.
Suffice it to say that coral too was, as Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition of the Sonnets points out "a stock comparison for lips." He cites no fewer than three examples of Shakespeare's contemporaries using it, and indeed Shakespeare himself features 'coral lips' in The Rape of Lucrece, the long narrative poem we mentioned in our last episode, and also in Act I, Scene 1 of The Taming of the Shrew, in a sentence which also has Lucentio tell Tranio about the lady he loves that "with her breath she did perfume the air," which will become relevant in just a moment. |
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If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun,
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If it is the case that snow is white, well, then let us just say her breasts are a dull or dingy brown.
This presumes, as it may, that a beautiful lady's breasts should in Shakespeare's day be of a snow-white hue and of course it stands in stark contrast to the 'ivory front' of Diella cited above. This gives us our first true indication of what the complexion is of this Dark Lady: 'dun' generally is defined as "a dull, greyish-brown colour" (Oxford Dictionaries), but as a horse's coat, it often has a distinctive yellowish-tan hue that stems from a diluted brown base colour. And so if Shakespeare's mistress's breasts are 'dun', then that means she is most likely of a southern Mediterranean or Middle Eastern skin tone. |
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If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:
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If it is the case that we may compare hairs to wires, then what grows on my mistress's head are simply black wires.
This quite in contrast to Dellia's hairs which are like wires of gold and smaller – for which read thinner – than the threads made by the mythological Arachne who was able to spin so fine a yarn in a challenge to Athena that it enraged the goddess to the point of hammering her with her weaving loom's shuttle. Arachne then hangs herself in shame for having offended the goddess, upon which she is turned into a spider, whence we get our arachnids and thence our arachnophobia. PRONUNCIATION: Note that in both instances here wires has one syllable: wi'rs. |
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I have seen roses damasked red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks, |
I have seen roses that have a variegated pattern in red and white, but I cannot see such roses or such patterns on her cheeks.
The line once more relies on a generally accepted standard of beauty which elevates a soft pink cheek upon an otherwise snow white face as ideal. |
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And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. |
And there is more delight to be found in some perfumes than in the breath of my mistress, whereby 'some' here may most likely be understood to mean 'most' or 'any' rather than just some select ones.
The fact in itself that the breath of his mistress does not remind him of the sweetest perfume is telling and for us today the power of the line is amplified, because we understand 'reek' to mean exclusively 'smell unpleasant' or 'stink'. This was not always the case in Shakespeare's day though, and editors are often keen to point out that it may here simply have a more general pre-18th Century meaning of 'emanate' or 'billow', perhaps in an endearing attempt to make our Will sound not quite so disparaging of his mistress. But: 'reeks' appears exactly once in Shakespeare, here, and 'reek' seven times: Coriolanus does not exactly flatter the Plebeians when he tells them: You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate As reek o’ th’ rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air, I banish you! Or Cloten in Cymbeline, who is told: Sir, I would advise you to shift a shirt; the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice. In Henry VIII, Shakespeare has the King say to Lincoln: You remember How under my oppression I did reek When I first moved you. Which is nowhere near as strong, though it doesn't conjure up delight either, and Antony, upon Caesar's death in Julius Caesar invites Brutus and the conspirators to kill him too: Now, whilst your purpled hands do reek and smoke, Fulfil your pleasure. Their hands are purple with Caesar's blood and they reek and smoke of his murder, so the fragrance won't exactly be one of flowers here either. In Love's Labour's Lost, King Ferdinand mocks his companions for breaking their vows to abstain from women for three years in the pursuit of study: I have been closely shrouded in this bush, And marked you both, and for you both did blush. I heard your guilty rhymes, observed your fashion, Saw sighs reek from you, noted well your passion. “Ay, me!” says one. “O Jove!” the other cries. One, her hairs were gold; crystal the other’s eyes. And again, we don't get the impression for sighs to 'reek' here to be a good thing, though note, if you will, how hairs are here once more threads or wires of gold. Falstaff to Mrs Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor: Thou mightst as well say I love to walk by the Counter-gate, which is as hateful to me as the reek of a lime-kiln. And in his first long narrative poem Venus and Adonis: Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil, And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage, So when Shakespeare here says that the breath of his mistress 'reeks', we can fairly safely assume that it somewhat does. |
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I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound; |
This, again needs no translation and little explanation.
Interesting perhaps to note though is that there is another contrast here not only with other poets' mistresses but also with his own young male lover, because in Sonnet 8 he asked him: Music to hear, why hearst thou music sadly? Which of course suggests that music hath not a more pleasing sound than his voice. |
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I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. |
I admit that when – as is implied – looking at her, I have never yet seen a goddess walk, because unlike goddesses, whose feet do not touch the earth when they pass, my mistress, when she walks, does so firmly on the ground.
In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare himself evokes the image of a goddess, here the eponymous Venus, who goes so lightly on the grass that the blades bend not under her feet: As falcon to the lure, away she flies; The grass stoops not, she treads on it so light, |
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And yet by heaven I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare. |
And yet, having said all this and in spite of all her many apparent and obvious flaws, I think that my love is as special or as choice or as exquisite as any woman who is being represented in other poets' poetry by false, as in deceitful, exaggerated, comparisons to wonderful things, such as the Sun, coral, gold wires, and the like.
This is a sentiment similar to one expressed in Sonnet 21: O let me, true in love, but truly write, And then, believe me, my love is as fair As any mother's child, though not so bright As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air. Let them say more that like of hearsay well, I will not praise that purpose not to sell. The great difference between this sonnet and the Fair Youth Sonnets being that while Shakespeare never describes his young man, he often asserts that he is beautiful, whereas here he not only acknowledges that his mistress is beautiful only to him though not to others, but he also describes her in terms that, certainly on their own and unless directly seen in contrast to the hyperbole of other poets, serve ill to prove these others wrong in their lack of appreciation. 'She' here is a noun for 'woman', so the sentence means 'my love is as rare as any woman who is being belied by false compare', though it could just about also be read – for us today as it happens perhaps more naturally – as 'my love is as rare as any love whom she has given the lie to or showed up to be being lied about by false compare. PRONUNCIATION: Note that as so often heaven here has one syllable: [hean]. |
With Sonnet 130, William Shakespeare, from the first, famous and oft-quoted line onwards, strikes a note possibly of defiance, possibly of satire, possibly both, subverting the traditional idolisation of a lover's object of desire through poetry and putting down a second powerful marker in quick succession that his mistress is different to other mistresses eulogised in sonnet form of then current fashion, not only but particularly because with her tan skin and black hair she doesn't fit the standard ideal of beauty of his day. In a tone that to us – and out context – sounds startlingly disparaging, he de-deifies and in doing so humanises her, and he once again asserts that both false beauty and false praise of beauty are not his style.
When with Sonnet 128 we thought that it could have been written by almost anyone to almost anyone, and with Sonnet 129 were confronted with a general, albeit impassioned, statement on what sexual desire for a woman and its fulfilment is and does to a man, with Sonnet 130 we are back where we started this section of sonnets for and about the Dark Lady: a highly specific defence of her as Shakespeare's mistress.
Sonnet 127, the first poem in this part of the collection, opened on a general note about how the perception of 'black' appears to have changed since the old days, and then spent the entire octave or first eight lines on essentially bemoaning the way genuine beauty has lost its place and standing in the world, largely owing to the indiscriminate use of cosmetics. It then distinguished Shakespeare's mistress as so inherently different that she possesses a beauty entirely of her own which, that sonnet suggested in its closing couplet, everyone now agrees should be a new model for beauty.
This, in light of what we now learn – and indeed of what is soon to come – may or may not have to be taken with a pinch of salt. At first glance Sonnet 130 to us sounds like something of a demolition job. Shakespeare almost wantonly seems to tell the world how supposedly 'ugly' his mistress is, but 'supposedly' here is operational and crucial.
Shakespeare disdains, nay abhors, artifice in beauty and falsehood in poetry. We know this for certain from many instances throughout these sonnets, as well as the plays: he really has no time for heavy makeup, large wigs, affected behaviour, bombastic acting; the fashion of the day is not for him.
The first we get of this is in Sonnet 20 where he wonders at the feminine appearance of his young male lover but still compares him favourably to the generality of women:
A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth,
whereby 'Nature's own hand painted' stands in a first stark contrast to the heavy face paint used by some women, and indeed also men, at the time, and 'false' comes up twice to describe the type of behaviour and affected manners he so clearly disapproves of.
Sonnet 21 is the poem we already cited that makes a similar point about the ridiculous comparisons some poets resort to to exult their – in turn supposed – beauties:
So is it not with me as with that muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use,
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Sonnets 67 & 68 combined are one big lament at fakery:
Why should false painting imitate his cheek
And steal dead seeming of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were borne,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
In Sonnets 82 and 83, Shakespeare's cavil is not so much with fake beauty as with fake poetry on beauty. Acknowledging that his younger lover has every right to listen to other poets too, he tells him:
And do so, love, yet when they have devised
What strained touches rhetoric can lend,
Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathised
In true plain words by thy true-telling friend,
And their gross painting might be better used
Where cheeks need blood, in thee it is abused.
I never saw that you did painting need,
And therefore to your fair no painting set.
I found, or thought I found, you did exceed
The barren tender of a poet's debt.
In Sonnet 84 he asks:
Who is it that says most, which can say more
Than this rich praise: that you alone are you,
And then advises anyone who tries to capture his young lover in lines of verse:
Let him but copy what in you is writ,
Not making worse what nature made so clear,
And such a counterpart shall fame his wit,
Making his style admired everywhere.
Here in Sonnet 130, though talking about a very different person – as different almost as can be – the principle Shakespeare employs is essentially the same: he rejects, indeed mocks the poetic convention of his contemporaries, even referencing his own uses of those same tropes, to present us with a real woman. Someone who may not be perfect, though she be right for him at this time. Someone who is not a goddess, but a human being he can relate to. Someone who intensely attracts him, even though, if Sonnet 129 is anything to go by, she also disturbs, and paradoxically even disgusts him. Someone whom, despite – perhaps also because – of all these failings, he can and does call 'my love'.
Does that then make this a romantic love poem after all? It really doesn't. What is certainly the case is that it far less disparages, as we might have received the impression, his mistress, than it ridicules other poets' odes to theirs, but if we allow Sonnet 128 its aloof generality and accept that it may as easily as not have been written about this Dark Lady or anyone else, then the two sonnets that very clearly are about her, Sonnets 127 and 130 both highlight an emotional whirl of contradictions as to what constitutes 'beauty', engulfed by the turmoil of Sonnet 129 that is wedged in-between with its torrent of conflicted feelings about sex.
William Shakespeare, this much we can tell from these sonnets so far, is in a confusing and confused place at this point, where his body does one thing, his soul does another, his heart does a third, and his pen does its best to work it all out in his mind. That this should come across to us as a little mixed up is hardly surprising.
But if we think that things are a little complicated for our Will right now, they are just about to get a whole lot worse. Because what comes next is a couple of sonnets that speak not of black hair and black eyes only, but of black deeds this lady has committed, and then two sonnets that reveal to us just what it is that she has done...
When with Sonnet 128 we thought that it could have been written by almost anyone to almost anyone, and with Sonnet 129 were confronted with a general, albeit impassioned, statement on what sexual desire for a woman and its fulfilment is and does to a man, with Sonnet 130 we are back where we started this section of sonnets for and about the Dark Lady: a highly specific defence of her as Shakespeare's mistress.
Sonnet 127, the first poem in this part of the collection, opened on a general note about how the perception of 'black' appears to have changed since the old days, and then spent the entire octave or first eight lines on essentially bemoaning the way genuine beauty has lost its place and standing in the world, largely owing to the indiscriminate use of cosmetics. It then distinguished Shakespeare's mistress as so inherently different that she possesses a beauty entirely of her own which, that sonnet suggested in its closing couplet, everyone now agrees should be a new model for beauty.
This, in light of what we now learn – and indeed of what is soon to come – may or may not have to be taken with a pinch of salt. At first glance Sonnet 130 to us sounds like something of a demolition job. Shakespeare almost wantonly seems to tell the world how supposedly 'ugly' his mistress is, but 'supposedly' here is operational and crucial.
Shakespeare disdains, nay abhors, artifice in beauty and falsehood in poetry. We know this for certain from many instances throughout these sonnets, as well as the plays: he really has no time for heavy makeup, large wigs, affected behaviour, bombastic acting; the fashion of the day is not for him.
The first we get of this is in Sonnet 20 where he wonders at the feminine appearance of his young male lover but still compares him favourably to the generality of women:
A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth,
whereby 'Nature's own hand painted' stands in a first stark contrast to the heavy face paint used by some women, and indeed also men, at the time, and 'false' comes up twice to describe the type of behaviour and affected manners he so clearly disapproves of.
Sonnet 21 is the poem we already cited that makes a similar point about the ridiculous comparisons some poets resort to to exult their – in turn supposed – beauties:
So is it not with me as with that muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use,
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Sonnets 67 & 68 combined are one big lament at fakery:
Why should false painting imitate his cheek
And steal dead seeming of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were borne,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
In Sonnets 82 and 83, Shakespeare's cavil is not so much with fake beauty as with fake poetry on beauty. Acknowledging that his younger lover has every right to listen to other poets too, he tells him:
And do so, love, yet when they have devised
What strained touches rhetoric can lend,
Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathised
In true plain words by thy true-telling friend,
And their gross painting might be better used
Where cheeks need blood, in thee it is abused.
I never saw that you did painting need,
And therefore to your fair no painting set.
I found, or thought I found, you did exceed
The barren tender of a poet's debt.
In Sonnet 84 he asks:
Who is it that says most, which can say more
Than this rich praise: that you alone are you,
And then advises anyone who tries to capture his young lover in lines of verse:
Let him but copy what in you is writ,
Not making worse what nature made so clear,
And such a counterpart shall fame his wit,
Making his style admired everywhere.
Here in Sonnet 130, though talking about a very different person – as different almost as can be – the principle Shakespeare employs is essentially the same: he rejects, indeed mocks the poetic convention of his contemporaries, even referencing his own uses of those same tropes, to present us with a real woman. Someone who may not be perfect, though she be right for him at this time. Someone who is not a goddess, but a human being he can relate to. Someone who intensely attracts him, even though, if Sonnet 129 is anything to go by, she also disturbs, and paradoxically even disgusts him. Someone whom, despite – perhaps also because – of all these failings, he can and does call 'my love'.
Does that then make this a romantic love poem after all? It really doesn't. What is certainly the case is that it far less disparages, as we might have received the impression, his mistress, than it ridicules other poets' odes to theirs, but if we allow Sonnet 128 its aloof generality and accept that it may as easily as not have been written about this Dark Lady or anyone else, then the two sonnets that very clearly are about her, Sonnets 127 and 130 both highlight an emotional whirl of contradictions as to what constitutes 'beauty', engulfed by the turmoil of Sonnet 129 that is wedged in-between with its torrent of conflicted feelings about sex.
William Shakespeare, this much we can tell from these sonnets so far, is in a confusing and confused place at this point, where his body does one thing, his soul does another, his heart does a third, and his pen does its best to work it all out in his mind. That this should come across to us as a little mixed up is hardly surprising.
But if we think that things are a little complicated for our Will right now, they are just about to get a whole lot worse. Because what comes next is a couple of sonnets that speak not of black hair and black eyes only, but of black deeds this lady has committed, and then two sonnets that reveal to us just what it is that she has done...
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!