Theme Reflection: When Your Lover Says You Aren't Easy on the Eyes...

Sonnets have the reputation of expressing ultimate true love-- the kind of love so intense, so special, that it must be immortalized in fourteen lines. Petrarch certainly has much to do with this tradition, penning over 300 sonnets to Laura, a woman who did not return his love, nor maybe even knew him. Shakespeare, another giant of the sonnet form, certainly demonstrates Petrarch's influence, giving us beautiful sonnets about enduring, infinite love and the poet's attempt to bestow immortality upon his beloved by giving it "black ink" (Sonnet 65). But, Shakespeare markedly differs from Petrarch-- where Petrarch is tortured, Shakespeare reveals a much more complex and varied attitude toward love, often satirizing the tendency toward overwrought language in contemporary sonnets. In this way, Shakespeare subverts the reader's expectations about how sonnets express love. In Sonnet 130, he begins by directly contradicting a popular metaphor for women's eyes, saying that his "mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;" they don't burn brighter than any other star, they don't dazzle him when he looks at her. He continues in each of the first three quatrains to deconstruct the notion of an ideal beloved-- she looks old, has wiry hair, has bad breath, and is in now way divine. Yet, masterfully, in the couplet he subverts all of this assumed negativity in the preceding twelve lines by affirming that all of those things he mentions make her exactly perfect for him and the one true love of his life. He's just not going to inflate her image to something she could never live up to. By subverting trite language of affected and hyperbolic adoration, he crafts a sonnet that is most tender and most sincere.