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In another post I spoke about the importance of close reading, and promised some examples. This is the first! Below you will find a colour-coded close reading of Sonnet 130. For the purpose of this post, and limited as I am by the blog format, I have omitted things that I don’t think are useful.

Sonnet 130 – William Shakespeare

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.

Some basics – this is a Shakespearean, English, or Elizabethan sonnet. The terms are used interchangeably to describe a sonnet made up of 3 four line stanzas [quatrains] and 1 rhyming couplet, with an alternating rhyme scheme [ABAB / CDCD / EFEF / GG]. Shakespearean sonnets will always have 14 lines. This is a sonnet from the Dark Lady sequence [127-152], and is written in iambic pentameter.¹

The first line of this sonnet is almost a simile. The speaker uses ‘like’ to draw the comparison, but subverts the form. Rather than telling us what their mistress is like, they tell us what she is not like.

The next two lines take a similar tact, but subvert the metaphor. Like the simile before, these lines imply what the more traditional metaphor might have been – coral red lips / snow white skin. By this point in the poem you will clearly see the speaker’s trend. They are telling us all the things their lover is not. Without more context it is hard to know why this is significant. This poem was written at a time when ‘Courtly love’ had become a literary convention, and the comparisons made in earlier courtly love poetry cliché. In this poem Shakespeare subverts and / or rejects a lot of the imagery / comparisons used in courtly love poetry [roses, coral, golden wire, etc.] in favour of talking honestly about the subject’s appearance. This is a break with convention, and makes 130 a very unconventional love poem, nigh on a parody.²

This line often trips people up: likely because this poem is one from the Dark Lady sequence. This line is frequently used by people without much knowledge of the Renaissance period to prove that the Dark Lady described is a Woman of Colour. This line does not prove this. We might think of wire as a thick, coarse, or even curly thing – and subsequently assume this line proves a more textured hair-type than typically expected of a white woman – but that is not what wire meant in this period. Wire, during the Renaissance, was an expensive kind of thread, often used in fine clothes and textiles. This line tells us that her hair was probably straight, but black rather than the preferable poetic gold.

Back to the subversion of the metaphor, much like the earlier lines, here Shakespeare again breaks with convention. Her cheeks are not rosy, thank you very much!

The next 4 lines span two quatrains, but are almost a section of their own. Unusually, for a sonnet written by Shakespeare, 130 is almost Petrarchan.³ 130 could be read as 2 sestets [6 line stanzas] and a couplet, as there is a shift in tone after the first 6 lines, but the rhyme scheme upsets such a reading. The authorship of the poem would also suggest a Shakespearean set up is more likely. Whilst the previous 6 lines focused on stating what she is not [coral lipped, snow-white, golden haired, rosy cheeked] the next 6 focus on what she is, to a degree at least. In the 4 lines I have pointed out in this colour, the speaker tells us that there is ‘more delight’ in ‘some perfumes’ than ‘in the breath that from my mistress reeks.’ Both ‘some’ and ‘reeks’ are important. ‘Some’ implies that there are equally ‘some’ perfumes that her reeking breath is preferable to, implying that it doesn’t truly reek. The hedging of the statement with ‘some’ is important, because it makes the word ‘reeks’ a starker juxtaposition. ‘Reeks’ implies a bad or very intense smell. If I told you someone ‘reeked of roses’ you’d assume the smell of flowers was so intense that they’d be better off avoided. Similarly her voice is not displeasing, nor unlike music, rather music is ‘more pleasing.’ This phrasing again implies a certain degree of pleasure in her voice. There are some more pleasant smells, and some more pleasant sounds, than her breath / voice – which is not necessarily to say that either characteristic of her’s is unpleasant.

Taken with the next two lines the previous 4 become even more important. As a sestet these 6 lines build towards the reveal of the couplet. The speaker is not maligning their mistress, but rather pointing out, honestly, all the ways that the conventional similes and metaphors of courtly love fail to capture her. She is not a goddess, but a woman. There is a distinct, and conscious subversion of form, and break with conventional love poetry. In 130, Shakespeare rejects the clichéd language of the courtly love poem, because it is not fitting for the subject of the poem – he rejects cliché / convention, in favour of honesty.

The rhyming couplet is the most important part of this sonnet, as it contains a volta. A volta is a twist – a shift in the tone, that retroactively impacts / alters how you read the poem as a whole. The volta in 130 explains why the speaker has been so seemingly mean to his lover. Here the speaker tells us that their love is more ‘rare’ [valuable] than that of any other writer of love poems, or admirer of their mistress, because their love is honest. She is a woman, not a goddess, her breath is not sweeter than perfume, her voice is not prettier than music, her cheeks aren’t like roses, her skin is darker than snow, her hair is black, her mouth is a normal amount of red, and her eyes are not like the sun – perhaps because one can look directly at them. This is important. In this couplet the speaker rejects courtly love openly, pointing out the dishonesty of it. Their mistress belies [disproves] the poetry of other admirers. That poetry relies on ‘false compare’, reiterating clichés that don’t actually fit her appearance. The speaker is clear, their love is more valuable because it is honest. The speaker does not love an idealised woman, but the true dark haired subject.

1. An iamb is a metric foot made of two beats, it is often likened to a heartbeat ‘ba Dum’ having one unstressed [short] and then one stressed [long] syllable per foot. Much of Shakespeare’s work, and plenty of other Renaissance verse, was written in iambic meter. The ‘x-meter’ phrase tells us how many iambs occur per line. Pent means 5 – in Sonnet 130 5 iambic feet occur per line, therefore it is written in iambic pentameter. ↩︎
2. This article https://www.bard.org/study-guides/courtly-love/ may be a useful starting point for more information about Courtly love in Shakespeare ↩︎
3. A Petrarchan sonnet is made of 1 octave [an 8 line stanza] and 1 sestet [a 6 line stanza]. ↩︎