Dark Beauty in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Sonnet is a poetry form that has lived its golden years in England during the Elizabethan times. Among them, Shakespeare’s 154 have been poetry lovers’ favourite for centuries. What is essentially done in those sonnets is, of course nothing other than praising love, particular lovers to be exact, and their beauty. However, in some particular sonnets, Shakespeare challenges the conventional beauty standards of his time, which was “fair (white) skin, rosy cheeks, dark eyes, and coral lips” (Karim-Cooper 142). Shakespeare supposedly wrote all his sonnets after sonnet 126 for/about a “dark lady”, who, understood by the Sonnets 127 and 130, was a dark skinned woman. Therefore the famous playwright and sonnetteer,
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While Sonnet 127 had “beauty” at the center, Sonnet 130 mocks the idea that love requires beauty. Moreover, he challenges the idea that a love poem should be praising and exaggerating the beloved’s beauty. Despite slowly becoming a “cliché” those qualities were “still expected” (Kulagin 6) in a sonnet about love, but Shakespeare challenges that idea and presents the reader with a beloved who is not like any other fair beauty, therefore “breaking the convention” (6). All the comparisons between the mistress in the sonnet and the natural objects which were commonly used to describe beautiful beloved women in other sonnets almost make the mistress sound like an “unlovable” person (10). However, this is not the point here, and especially in the lines “I never saw a goddess go;/My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.” it is understood that the point of this sonnet is to celecrate the real, human beauty, particularly those of beloveds in the lover’s eyes, instead of glorifying them and attributin goddess-like features to them. At this point, “divine comparisons are not relevant”, and the beloved does not need to be a goddess to be praised and loved as proved by the last lines, “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/As any she belied with false compare.”.
Besides having making a point of true beauty and love, Sonnet 130 gives a detailed description of the Dark Lady. She has dark eyes “nothing like the sun”, doesn’t have red lips or rosey cheeks, is dark skinned “her breasts are dun”, has black hair “black wires grow on her head”, and has no particularly beautiful scent or voice “in some perfumes there is more delight”, “music hath a far more pleasing
While Sonnet 127 had “beauty” at the center, Sonnet 130 mocks the idea that love requires beauty. Moreover, he challenges the idea that a love poem should be praising and exaggerating the beloved’s beauty. Despite slowly becoming a “cliché” those qualities were “still expected” (Kulagin 6) in a sonnet about love, but Shakespeare challenges that idea and presents the reader with a beloved who is not like any other fair beauty, therefore “breaking the convention” (6). All the comparisons between the mistress in the sonnet and the natural objects which were commonly used to describe beautiful beloved women in other sonnets almost make the mistress sound like an “unlovable” person (10). However, this is not the point here, and especially in the lines “I never saw a goddess go;/My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.” it is understood that the point of this sonnet is to celecrate the real, human beauty, particularly those of beloveds in the lover’s eyes, instead of glorifying them and attributin goddess-like features to them. At this point, “divine comparisons are not relevant”, and the beloved does not need to be a goddess to be praised and loved as proved by the last lines, “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/As any she belied with false compare.”.
Besides having making a point of true beauty and love, Sonnet 130 gives a detailed description of the Dark Lady. She has dark eyes “nothing like the sun”, doesn’t have red lips or rosey cheeks, is dark skinned “her breasts are dun”, has black hair “black wires grow on her head”, and has no particularly beautiful scent or voice “in some perfumes there is more delight”, “music hath a far more pleasing