Shakespeare insists that the woman he loves is a flesh-and-blood mortal, and no “goddess” (11) (or super-model as we might now say).
He is not going to exaggerate (or “belie”, 14) the beauty of the woman he loves in this way. All these stock or clichéd comparisons of Elizabethan love poetry for praising a woman’s beauty are, he implies, unrealistic and silly. Shakespeare turns all these conventions upside down. Of course, the custom was to say how beautiful and marvellous each feature was. This kind of sonnet would form a list of her beautiful features of face and figure, variously praising her eyes, lips, cheeks, teeth, breasts, etc. It was very customary, following the conventions set up by the Italian lyric poet Petrarch (1304–74), to write sonnets praising the beauty of the woman you were in love with. Sonnet 130 refers to her, even though we do not know her name. Most of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to a young man, but towards the end of the sequence there emerges the so-called “Dark Lady”, a woman with whom he seems to have had an often difficult and unhappy relationship. This is the 130th sonnet in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence of 154 sonnets, published in 1609. You were supposed to be able to recognize a goddess by the way she walked. The word was not used then with our heavily negative sense, but more neutrally.ġ1 go: walk. Damask roses were a sweet-smelling variety popular at the time.Ĩ reeks: is exhaled. The mistress, however, has black and not blonde hair.ĥ damasked: mingled (red and white). Ornamental head-dresses of the period often contained gold wires, so that it was quite normal to compare lush blonde hair with the gold wires in the head-dress above. her eyes are not bright and shining.Ĥ wires: (gold) wires. Prebend House Advanced Studies Seminarsġ My … sun: i.e.Department of Economics and International Studies.Resources and language learning strategies.The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found.Resources for Schools – English GCSE & AS Level.Department of English and Digital Media.Global Security & Intelligence Notes (GSIN).MA Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors.
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