Shakespeare Sonnet

A sonnet is a 14-line poem usually written in iambic pentameter. They often take on the rhyme scheme of the English or Italian forms. William Shakespeare's “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun” is from 1609 and it is an English sonnet. This Shakespearean sonnet expresses that women do not have to look like flowers or the sun in order to be beautiful because real love does not need the perfect setting or people since we are humans and imperfection is nothing to be ashamed of; true love comes from the heart.

“My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,” is a traditional English form poem, also known as a Shakespearean Sonnet. The rhyme scheme for this poem is: a,b,a,b,c,d,c,d,e,f,e,f,g,g, containing 3 quatrains and a couplet. A quatrain is a 4-line stanza (a poetic paragraph), and a couplet is a 2-line rhyme. This sonnet compares a woman to a number of other beauties, but it seems like everything about her is not good enough for the writer. These comparisons can be seen throughout the poem: on the first line, when it says that her eyes are “nothing like the sun,” (Shakespeare 1126), meaning that her eyes could be prettier. On the second line with: her lips are less red than coral, saying that her lips are pale. Also that her breasts are dun-colored, again getting compared to white snow, and at the end of the first quatrain it reads, “If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head,” (1126) this is self-explanatory saying that her hairs are like black wires on her head. In the second quatrain, the speaker keeps up his romanticism by saying that he has seen roses separated by color into red and white, but he cannot see any roses in his mistress’s cheeks; and also the breath that “reeks” (1126) from his mistress is less desirab...

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...o not finish reading the poem, then she would have filed a divorce because it is only at the end that one can fully understand this poem and what the speaker is trying to say by making all of those comparisons. Throughout the poem, the speaker seems to see the glass half empty instead of half full because he likes some of the qualities that his woman has, but then he turns it around like with her breath not being as pleasant as perfume or the way that she talks. The rhetorical structure of Shakespeare's “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun” is important because it creates the effect of an expanding and developing argument, and prevents the poem from becoming stagnant by relying on funny comparisons between the speaker's mistress with several objects and things for its first twelve lines, which keeps the sonnet flowing smoothly while also stating a clear theme.