This post originally appeared on Books Take You Places in 2015 as part of the Bard on the Blogs series.Ĭheck back every Friday in April for a new Poetically Speaking post. And, really, isn’t that the standard to which every poem, not to mention every writer, should strive? Like a magician diverting the audience’s attention, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is a misdirect of sorts as he uses simple language and plain ideas to give voice to an abstract concept. Being a sonnet is impressive enough, but also being funny and conversational? Being timely and relevant while being more than four hundred years old? Astonishing. Sonnet 130 challenges everything readers think they know about love poems–and it does so with humor. Still, by the end, it’s impossible to think the narrator feels anything but a deep love for the subject. This sonnet never calls the subject of the poem beautiful or any other niceties. The interplay between what is overtly stated and what is left unsaid here works as a primer for how to write and how to do it well. Instead of showering his mistress with false comparisons, the narrator suggests that he loves her all the more fiercely for seeing her clearly–a beautiful thought that is as relevant today as it would have been in Shakespeare’s own lifetime.
Like the best poems, Sonnet 130 is layered. My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:Īnd yet by heaven, I think my love as rare, That music hath a far more pleasing sound: I love to hear her speak, yet well I know Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I have seen roses damasked, red and white,Īnd in some perfumes is there more delight If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun Ĭoral is far more red, than her lips red: One of my favorite Shakespeare sonnets, one I refer to often when trying to improve my own writing, is Sonnet 130. In each sonnet, he drew out beautiful imagery and sentiments from the rigid form that follows a specific line structure and rhyme scheme. What’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear the name William Shakespeare?Ĭonsidering the iambic pentameter of his plays, it makes sense that Shakespeare was also a brilliant poet who wrote 154 sonnets over the course of his lifetime.
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