Physical Features In Shakespeare's Sonnet 130

In Shakespeare: Sonnet 130, by William Shakespeare, the sonnet paints an emotionally bitter picture of an ugly woman described by her lover, the speaker. The speaker points out the woman’s features by noting her conventionally unpleasant physical features by discussing his mistress’s real beauty, which is not perfect, but true. Also, the mistresses’ features are exaggerated by the way the speaker compares her to only polar opposites. The sonnet explores the broad idea of conventional beauty and it’s relation to realism, as well as the imperfections found in human features. It goes further to point out the difference between the two, and proposes which one is better, through the speaker’s description of his mistress and the admiration he feels …show more content…
For example, the inconsistent stressed and unstressed syllables throughout the poem disrupt, the beautifulness of the iambic pentameter in the sonnet, but do not tarnish it. This is shown in the following quote, “If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head. /I have seen roses damasked red and white, / But no such roses see I in her cheeks ( Shakespeare 4-6); This inconsistency in stressed and unstressed syllables, in a way becomes the ugly features of the poem, in relation to the ugly features on the mistress in the poem. Also, like the speaker in the poem, I too am not deterred from the beautifulness of the poem when spoken, the same way as the speaker is not deterred from the attraction he feels towards his mistress. Furthermore, the irregular iambic pattern exemplifies the idea that the lack of beauty in a person, as in the mistress and the poem’s inconsistences in iambic meter does not make any less the poem or the mistress, but are just a part of it. As the poem implies, imperfections do not overshadow an