• Sonnet 130: My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun

  • May 4 2025
  • Length: 29 mins
  • Podcast

Sonnet 130: My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun

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  • Summary

  • 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.
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