Analysis Of If Snow Be White Why Then Her Breast Are Dun

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The poem is about the speaker's description about his beloved through comparing and contrasting some images in nature such as "sun" (line 1), "coral" (line 2), "snow" (line 3), "roses" (line 5) and many more. Through describing a sequence of vivid and mental imageries in contrast to the beloved' physical attributes, the readers will have a clear picture of what the beloved looks like. The conflict of the poem is generally maneuvered by the tone of the speaker - the vulgarity and the mockery in his descriptions of his beloved accounts for the tension that is present in the quatrains. The first quatrain of the sonnet introduces the mistress' eyes "which are nothing like the sun" (line 1). It is very straightforward and may be viewed as harsh, but one can feel an initial powerful energy supported by the rest of the lines of the quatrain. The readers will see that the contrast of the beautiful images in nature is readily established in the first quatrain. The line "If snow be white, why then her breast are dun" (line 3) signifies that her mistress' breast are not as white as that of a snow. On the same note, the speaker contrasts the redness of her lips as nothing as that of a coral (line 2) and that his mistress has "wires" for hair - all of these may be viewed as a form of a mockery. …show more content…

From this point the poem becomes compelling to the reader mainly because the poet or the speaker, as opposed to the conventional idea of romanticizing his beloved, is detailing the otherwise negative physical attributes of the

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