“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” seems an unlikely line to begin a poem with – after all, we’re more used to poets using simile to tell us that things are similar to each other. And, if there’s no worthwhile comparison to be made between the eyes and the sun, why bring the subject up at all? The answer, of course, is that Shakespeare’s statement is implicitly criticizing the clichés of love poetry in the Renaissance by pretending to take them seriously.
He continues, in mock consternation, to avouch that “Coral is far more red than her lips’ red”, and that “I have seen roses damask’d red and white/ But no such roses see I in her cheeks.” Shakespeare is mocking the poetic technique known as “blazon”, in which the poet listed the beloved’s attributes and made elaborate comparisons with each one. The critic J.A. Cuddon cites the famous example of a “blazon” in this passage from Epithalamion by Shakespeare’s contemporary Edmund Spenser: “Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright,/ Her forehead ivory white,/ Her cheeks like apples which the sun hath rudded,/ Her lips cherries charming men to bite”. The technique was also used in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella by Queen Elizabeth’s courtier Philip Sidney.
Shakespeare makes this criticism of the unrealistic terms of the blazon clear in the final couplet of Sonnet 130: “But by heaven, I think my love as fair/ As any she belied by false compare”. He is obviously rejecting the overblown conventions of romantic poetry, but is he putting anything n their place? Some readers have seen “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like The Sun” as a moving attempt to write a love poem about an actual person rather than an abstraction, celebrating the imperfections of a real woman in preference to the ideal standards of female beauty.
Others have suggest that this reading would impose modern ideas upon a sixteenth century poem, and ask whether such a “feminist” attitude can be found in any of the other sonnets. After all, Shakespeare doesn’t really describe the beloved in Sonnet 130, he simply explains what she isn’t like, and in rather unflattering terms. Such readers would suggest that the beloved of Sonnet 130 is not a real woman, but simply a figure to pit against the traditional romantic abstraction, just as the poem pits itself against other blazon poems. It must be left up to individual readers to decide whether Sonnet 130 is an attempt at a realistic love poem, or just a critique of the ridiculous conceits of Shakespeare’s poetic rivals.
