My Mistress Eyes Are Nothing Like The Sun Rhyme Scheme

“My Mistress Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun” is William Shakespeare’s 130th sonnet. It follows the traditional sonnet style that many of Shakespeare's poem incorporate. The sonnet is 14 lines long and has an ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme as do many of Shakespeare's famous works. Lines 1 and 3 rhyme sun and dun, lines 2 and 4 rhyme red and head, lines 5 and 7 rhyme white and delight, lines 6 and 8 rhyme cheeks and reeks, lines 9 and 11 rhyme know and go,lines 10 and 12 rhyme sound and ground, and lines 13 and 14 rhyme rare and compare. The poem is written in iambic pentameter as were many poems in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The poem follows this meter closely including the two rhyming lines at the end called a couplet.
“And yet,
The first overarching theme is that the root of love. The message many leave with after reading the poem a few times is that the root of love is not a shallow one. The narrator ponders comparisons without accepting them as germane. It seems as if he does this ironically and thus is bringing attention to the problems instead of spreading the stereotypes. The nature of these comparisons becomes apparent only when the narrator says, “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare,(line 13-14). These two lines perfect the poem’s meaning from one that might be an expression of dissatisfaction with his mistress to a poem showing that love does not come from anything you can immediately judge about a person. This leads into the next theme in the poem: appearance. Appearance is the most distinguished theme because the repeated appearance-related similes make it impossible not to notice. A particularly peculiar example is given in the line, “If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head,”(4). This line might seem initially to be simply stating that the mistress’s hair is black, but it directly criticizing her hair. When one imagines someone with “black wires,”(4) as hair the image comes of an ugly doll, not a beautiful woman comes to mind. This theme of appearance comes up in multiple other similar ways, with all being
Sonnet 18 is a very emotional and flirty poem, while Sonnet 130 seems, broadly speaking, to be satirical. Thou these poems both have roots in love and attraction they go about this in different ways. While Sonnet 18 speaks of love in a classical and romantic “Shakespearean” way, Sonnet 130 chooses to describe love more realistically. Sonnet 18 is full of lovey-dovey lines about how his sweetheart is better than a summer’ day. Lines such as, “Thou art more lovely and more temperate”(2) are the foundation of this poem. The poem reads like a love song and may have been read like one as it is theorized that Shakespeare wrote it for someone. In contrast, Sonnet 130 reads in a way that almost seems to be mocking poems like Sonnet 18. Sonnet 18 is a poem all about comparing a woman to a summer’s day and Sonnet 130 end with the resonating line claiming that his love is as good, “As any she belied with false compare,”(14). This seems to be a fairly direct criticism of poems like Sonnet 18. Sonnet 18 describes the woman as an eternal and angelic figure while in the other the narrator directly states that, “My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground”(12). This is another example of Sonnet 130 realistically describing women while Sonnet 18 describes women in hackneyed terms. This kind of thing is odd for Shakespeare to say, so it begs the question of whether this is Shakespeare’s true voice and whether or not he