My Mistress Eyes By Shakespeare Tone

Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and Pablo Neruda’s “My ugly love” are popularly known to describe beauty in a way hardly anyone would write: through the truth. It’s a common fact that modern lovers and poets speak or write of their beloved with what they and the audience would like to hear, with kind and breathtaking words and verses. Yet, Shakespeare and Neruda, honest men as they both were, chose to write about what love truly is, it matters most what’s on the inside rather than the outside. The theme of true beauty and love are found through Shakespeare and Neruda’s uses of imagery, structure, and tone.

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…” is a sonnet written by William Shakespeare and is also known as Sonnet 130. He wrote this poem to mock the conventional Petrarchan love sonnets which are about women who have unattainable beauty. This poem is written in the Shakespearean sonnet format which consists of a total 14 lines with the first 12 lines divided into three quatrains, and the last two lines make up a couplet. The quatrains establish the motif or problem of the poem while the ending couplet explains or resolves the previous lines. Sonnet 130 is a long conceit where the speaker of the poem goes through a long list of comparisons that seem like insults. The speaker uses juxtaposition to show that his love for his mistress is strong by describing her in a blunt way that seems insulting on the surface, but he reveals in the end he loves her even though she is flawed.

Shakespeare expresses his love for his mistress through metaphors, typical of sonnets about love. However, those comparisons describe his poor mistress in unpleasant ways, in distinct to typical love sonnets. Poets usually describe the beauty of their lover through embellished comparisons and through the usage of romantic language. Shakespeare pokes fun at the fact that these comparisons are too

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (“Sonnet 18”) is one of Shakespeare’s most famous poems. It is the model English, or Shakespearean sonnet: it contains three quatrains and a finishing couplet.. The poem follows the traditional English sonnet form by having the octet introduce an idea or set up the poem, and the sestet beginning with a volta, or turn in perspective. In the octet of Sonnet 18, Shakespeare poses the question “Shall I compare the to a summer’s day” and basically begins to describe all the bad qualities of summer. He says it’s too windy, too short, too hot, and too cloudy. Eventually fall is going to come and take away all the beauty because of the changes nature brings. In the sestet, however, his tone changes as he begins to talk about his beloved’s “eternal summer” (Shakespeare line 9). This is where the turn takes place in the poem. Unlike the summer, their beauty will never fade. Not even death can stop their beauty for, according to Shakespeare, as long as people can read this poem, his lover’s beauty will continue to live. Shakespeare believes that his art is more powerful than any season and that in it beauty can be permanent.

Through isolating that line, it not only emphasises its importance as a statement, with ‘summer’ being a metaphor for his son, and thus showing pure paternal love; but also the importance of the new tone, pride. The word ‘But’, although with negative connotations, is used to positively emphasise the importance of the new phase of acceptance of his son’s death, and the continuation of his paternal love. It is through this line that Shakespeare goes on to explain how his love for his son will never diminish, as it is immortalised, along with his son, in the poem. This is the act of creating an autotelic memorial in that the poem will never fade away, ever when the writer dies. Due to this, Shakespeare is able to show that his concept of love, no matter what form it is in, is so strong and true that it is infinite and can overcome all obstacles, even death itself. To a 16th century reader, the concept of love taking many forms and overcoming even death was unconventional, as it contrasted greatly to the accepted ideal of courtly love, which was limited and weak. To a modern day reader, whose greatest fear is death; being told love overcomes death reassures them of its strength. This promotes Shakespeare’s ideology, especially through contrast in the

Although Shakespeare appears to be conforming, he still elevates his work above the exhausted conventions of other Elizabethan sonneteers. Instead of objectifying his lover through trite comparisons, he declares that she is too beautiful and pleasant to be compared even to a day of the most enjoyable season of the year. While most consider the realm of nature to be eternal and that of humans to be transitory, Shakespeare accentuates the death of a season and imbues his sweetheart with everlasting life. He ingeniously inverts the scheme of things in order to grant his love perpetual existence through his poetry.

Just as Mozart was passionate about composing music, Gandhi for advocating non-violence, and Mother Teresa for serving the poor, William Shakespeare’s character of Romeo in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, also displays the personality trait of being passionate. To be passionate, one must show intense feelings of love for someone or something. In Act II, scene ii of the play, Romeo expresses this passion for Juliet in the form of a soliloquy. This scene ensues in the dark of night while Romeo is observing Juliet from afar. The literary elements and diction in Romeo’s “But soft!”

In the first few lines of the poem, the reader can already receive a feel of the irony as the poet describes the scene of a maiden left behind as her lover falls in battle. The poet illustrates a scene as to where most readers would feel sorrow and sympathy towards the maiden and perhaps have the speaker in the poem enlighten the

There is a similar theme running through both of the poems, in which both mistresses are refusing to partake in sexual intercourse with both of the poets. The way in which both poets present their argument is quite

Thus, it is implied that Shakespeare’s skills as a lover are mimetic to those of his poetry, prose and plays for which he is still celebrated today. Euphemism is employed in the instance of a “verb dancing in the center of a noun”(Line 7) and the description of the narrator as a “softer rhyme”(Line7), where the poet personifies literary terms in order to describe their bodies and movement. The purposeful inclusion of this comparison escalates their lovemaking to an art form, in this case poetry, and as a result all literary terms are loaded with euphemism and sensuality. In addition, Duffy employs the senses, “touch”, “scent” and “taste” (Line10) in order to heighten the already sensual tone and to reinforce how vivid the memory of their lovemaking is to the narrator. Furthermore, contrast is employed by comparing the poetic sensuality of their lovemaking and intensity of their bond with that of their guests in the “other bed” (Line 11) of whom she asserts are merely capable of unsatisfactorily “dribbling their prose”(Line

The narrator appears to be almost insulting his lover, stating in the beginning that “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (l. 1) among other remarks. After the use of many transposed similes, the narrator has a change of heart in line fourteen, stating “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she belied with false compare”. According to Dominic Grace, who wrote the scholarly article “Literary Contexts in Poetry: William Shakespeare's "My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun", states that this means “he thinks his beloved is as unique as any other woman who has been lied about by other poets through the use of false comparators” (par.

The lover’s eyes looking at the poet “were as eyes that rove”. The comparison raised in the use of the word “as” add to the idea that the lover has left in spirit and wandered away. The word “rove” adds movement to the scene leading into an enjambment between the first and second line. This reveals that the wandering of the lover is an internal one, one of remembrance concerned with “tedious riddles of years ago”. The past is strongly brought into the scene in this line with its emphasis on “years ago” which is created through the use of the semi-colon placed just after these words. The riddles themselves are “tedious” which seems to imply they no longer hold their appeal, have become monotonous because they are long known and understood, no longer difficult to understand they are now merely objects of the over’s distanced inspection. This distance and lack of meaning is furthered in the lines “And some words played between us to and fro/ / On which lost the more by our love”. The words are useless and empty, they merely play like a ball game “to and fro”. All meaning has become lost between the lovers, and in the last line this meaninglessness has been made worse because of the love that they once shared. In this is the tragedy of a love that has died.

The title of the poem “My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun” suggests that the speaker is not in love with his ‘mistress’. However, this is not the case. Shakespeare uses figurative language by using criticizing hyperboles to mock the traditional love sonnet. Thus, showing not only that the ideal woman is not always a ‘goddess’, but mocking the way others write about love. Shakespeare proves that love can be written about and accomplished without the artificial and exuberant. The speaker’s tone is ironic, sarcastic, and comical turning the traditional conceit around using satire. The traditional iambic pentameter rhyming scheme of the sonnet makes the diction fall into place as relaxed, truthful, and with elegance in the easy flowing verse. In turn, making this sonnet one of parody and real love.

Shakespeare uses two powerful metaphors in line five and in line six to compare the summer's imperfections to the perfection of the beloved. In line five he uses a metaphor "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines" to describe that in the summer the sun gets to hot and this is yet another imperfection of a summer day which the beloved is superior to. Although some may compare there beloveds eyes with the glow or beauty of "the eye of heaven" here the speaker has chosen to claim the opposite saying that the sun is inferior to his beloved in that her eyes are more beautiful. In line six of the poem the idea of the sun being imperfect is further enhanced by phrase "gold complexion dimmed" this is implying that the sun is imperfect in that it is not always hot enough. Here the speaker implies that the beloved is flawless in that her complexion is never changed, remaining "gold" like. Nature that surrounds us is beautiful, the trees, ocean, and the wild life, and although the speaker makes a point to disfigure the view of nature the intention of the poet is to reinforce the beauty of the beloved.

William Shakespeare is recognized for being one of greatest poets of all time. His works are still popular to this day. Many of his works included extended metaphors and similes with rhetorical language and were rooted in the nature of love. Two of his poems that are rather alike, but also very contrastive are “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and “My mistresses’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” They both contain a core theme of love or anti-love in some aspects. While these two poems are built around the same type of subject, their interpretations come across in separate ways. In contrast to Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” which is a serious love poem that contains imagery and metaphors, Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” is more negative and humorous but contains imagery and similes.