Sonnet 130 Analysis

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Explication of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130
This sonnet dramatizes the conflict between appearance and reality, specifically drawing attention to the excessive use of romantic cliches in literature during the elizabethan era. William Shakespeare uses similes and metaphor to compare the speaker’s mistress to that of unpleasant and insulting attributes. In doing this, Shakespeare makes a joke out of the traditional conventions of love poetry at the time and their unrealistic nature when describing women. The nature of these comparisons give the reader a sense of discomfort and the volta within the concluding couplet cause the reader to reevaluate the sincerity of the falsehoods riddled in typical poetry regarding love.
The sonnet begins by addressing the speaker 's mistress and how her plain attributes compare to stereotypical romantic bodies in literature. Within the first quatrain of the Shakespearean style sonnet the speaker touches more primarily on his mistress’s physical attributes and juxtaposes them to many famously beautiful sights of nature. Doing this primarily through use of metaphor Shakespeare juxtaposes the beauty of these natural sights to the ugliness of his mistresses corresponding body parts. In the first line the author uses the word “nothing” to negate the following simile which relates his mistress’s eyes to the sun. The immediate annulment of this famous cliche strongly drives across the point that the poem and all further analogies to his mistress