My Mistress Eyes Analysis

During Shakespeare’s time, the societal norms that cultivated women were very precise. Women were held to high standards both look and act in a specific way, but did society ever take it too far? Many poets during Shakespeare’s time wrote traditional blazon sonnets, ones that compared women to the most wondrous things life has to offer; gems, jewels, plants, and stars. Such beautiful comparisons were made, but the women were made out to be so unrealistic. Women had become a collection of objects rather than human, but Shakespeare shed some light on the matter at hand and presented a new way of thinking. In Shakespeare’s My Mistress’ Eyes, he purposefully contradicts the typical blazon tradition, uses enjambment, and uses rhyme schemes to create

The poem can be considered a blazon traditional sonnet although it presents the tradition in an unconventional way. The typical way a blazon sonnet presents itself is through the broken-down description of a woman’s qualities. Women are usually highly praised and they are made to appear so out of reach; they become unobtainable even by the poet themselves. Women are portrayed as a collection of objects rather than human which accentuates the idea that they are so unattainable because no woman like them actually exist. The idea that beauty is what defines, and what controls a man’s love for a woman, is not depicted in Shakespeare’s sonnet, My Mistress’ Eyes. In fact, Shakespeare takes a completely new twist on the tradition, one that many individuals find insulting, while the rest find

Throughout the poem, Shakespeare emphasizes the societal norm or perspective that is relatively respected and then denounces it with the exception. For example, in the third line of the first quatrain, Shakespeare wrote, “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun.” The idea that the whiteness of skin is so widely recognized as the beautiful type of skin asserts the fact that she does not have white skin, “her breasts be dun.” This line shows how powerful the comparison truly is. The normal beauty is being defied by the woman being described, but she is not being put down, she is simply being described, and beauty norms are being