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Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” seems to be written about a rare and special love for an imperfect woman. Through using a clearly anti-Petrarchan work, Shakespeare has complimented the genuine beauty of a woman.
To many, Sonnet 130 may come across as a derogatory, misogynistic view of women, but in fact Shakespeare has taken the traditional love poem of his time to a deeper, more intimate level where it is the inner beauty that matters.
Written in the traditional Sonnet form with three quatrains and a couplet, the rhyme scheme is one of ababcdcdefefgg. In the first quatrain, Shakespeare rhyming is with the “sun” and “dun” as well as “red” and “head”, similarly in the second and third quatrains respectively we find “white”, “delight”, “cheeks” and “reeks”, and “know”, “go”, “sound” and “ground”. Whereas the final couplet’s rhyming is in the “rare” and “compare”. “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” contains fourteen lines with ten syllables per line and follows Shakespeare’s famous iambic pentameter meter scheme. ... Through this form, Shakespeare has created an easy, flowing, enjoyable read.
Even though Shakespeare by using an anti-Petrarchan work to put across his feelings of unconditional love, he also manages to ridicule the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, John Wootton, and Michael Drayton. Whilst Wyatt’s “Avising the Bright Beams of These Fair Eyes”, the first line of “My Mistress’ Eyes” Shakespeare asserts that they are “Nothing Like the Sun”. In a poem published in England’s Helican, John Wootton boasts that his love’s “lips like scarlet of the finest dyes” where Shakespeare is sure that “Coral is far more red than her lips’ red”, and in Michael Drayton’s poem “To His Coy Love”, he begs his lover “Show me no more those snowy breasts” and Shakespeare reassures us in Sonnet 130 that compared to snow his mistress’ breast “are dun”.
Approximate Word count = 1361
Approximate Pages = 5.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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