Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare

First published: 1609, in Sonnets

Type of poem: Sonnet

The Poem

Sonnet 130 is a blazon, a lyric poem cataloging the physical characteristics and virtues of the beloved, in typical English or Shakespearean sonnet form—three quatrains and a couplet in iambic pentameter rhymed abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The first-person voice of the poem should be understood as that of a dramatic persona; even if William Shakespeare means it to represent himself, he nevertheless has to create a distinct personality in the language, and from this distance, the reader has no way of knowing how accurately this might describe the man. The speaker describes his beloved in comparison with, or rather in contrast to, natural phenomena. In the love poem tradition, as it emerged in English poetry in imitation of the sonnets of fourteenth century Italian poet Petrarch, poets often compare their beloveds to the elements of nature. In this sonnet, Shakespeare takes the opposite tack by describing his beloved as “nothing like” the beautiful productions of nature or art.

Her eyes, the poet begins, do not shine like the sun; nor are her lips as red as coral. When compared to the whiteness of snow, his beloved’s breasts seem “dun,” a dull gray. The “wires” of line 4 refer to gold spun into golden thread, and his beloved’s hair, if the metaphoric description of hairs as golden wires is valid, can only be seen as black, or tarnished beyond all recognition.

The damasked roses of the fifth line are variegated roses of red and white, and such, the poet continues, cannot be seen in his woman’s face. Perfume, too, is an inaccurate simile for his lover’s breath, since most perfumes are more pleasing. The word “reeks” in line 8 simply means “breathes forth” in Elizabethan English, although our modern sense of the word as denoting an offensive smell certainly emphasizes Shakespeare’s point of contrast.

At the ninth-line “turn”—the formal point at which sonnets typically introduce an antithesis or redirect their focus—the speaker continues in the same vein, noting how music has a more pleasing sound than his lover’s voice, though he also introduces an important point: None of these contrasts is to suggest that he finds his beloved any less pleasing. He loves her voice, as he does her other characteristics, but honestly he must acknowledge that music is, objectively speaking, more pleasing to the senses.

Lines 11 and 12 dismiss conventional descriptions of women as goddesslike. Who among mortal men has ever witnessed a goddess in order to make such similes in the first place? All this lover knows is what he sees, and his mistress is, like him, quite earthly and earthbound, walking on the ground.

The sonnet’s couplet then explicates the point of the above contrasts. The lover’s objective comparisons of his beloved with nature and human artifacts of perfume and music, however unfavorable to the woman, do not change his subjective perception of her: She is as rare as any of those women whom poets describe with comparisons that exaggerate, and thus belie, human beauty.

Forms and Devices

The effect of the formal division of the Shakespearean sonnet, the four quatrains and closing couplet, is to pile up examples of a single idea—that the beloved’s beauty is really not comparable to the productions of nature and human art—so that by line 12, the reader wonders if there is anything at all about the woman that can be seen objectively as beautiful. The last two lines then provide a memorable explication of that idea: Objectivity and actual beauty are really no concern of the lover. While lines 11 and 12 dismiss comparisons to heavenly beauty as meaningless—mortals have no experience of the metaphysical world on which to base such similes—Shakespeare uses the mild expletive “by heaven” in line 13 to suggest in contrast that the impassioned subjectivity of the lover is itself metaphysical in origin, a kind of grace.

The speaker’s attitude in this poem is strikingly antimetaphoric, and lines 3 and 4 subject two conventional metaphors to examination by deductive logic. Line 3 begins with a premise, “If snow be white,” and concludes that the woman’s breasts are “dun.” In technical terms, the rhetorical device employed here is an “enthymeme,” a syllogism in which one of the terms is left out and must be inferred by the reader. One may reconstruct the full syllogism thus: Snow is white; my lover’s breasts are dull gray; therefore, my lover’s breasts are not like snow. Since snow is in fact white, one can concur with the conclusion’s logic and deny the validity of the simile “women’s breasts are white like snow.” Line 4 offers another enthymeme beginning with the premise “If hairs be wires” and concluding that the woman’s hair is black, or tarnished, wire. The full syllogism here would read: Hairs are golden wires; my lover’s hairs are black; therefore, my lover’s hairs must be tarnished.

The conclusion follows logically, but the metaphoric premise is untrue: Hairs are not wires, and if the woman is judged on the basis of this premise, one can only conclude by denigrating the woman’s physical characteristics as sullied examples of an ideal: tarnished gold. This is what Shakespeare means by “false compare”—unjust comparisons that not only ignore the possibility that the woman may be beautiful in her own right, but also miss the value of the beloved in the eyes of her lover: To him, she is, if not golden, at least as “rare.” That the poet has his persona subject love and beauty to deductive logic at all tells the reader something important about the lover’s attitude and about the overall meaning of the poem.