NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, BUT BEAUTIFUL

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is more than familiar, but it will never breed contempt. In fact, a close reading of the famous sonnet, sparked this morning by Patrick Stewart’s performance of it, yields an utterly fresh view of reality. Rhetorically, the poem attacks the act of comparing any living thing to any other thing on the grounds that such comparisons diminish the uniqueness and variability of each life. And Shakespeare’s attack on the tendency to compare a living human being to an abstract ideal is incomparably strong. In the case of this sonnet, the assault is on the habit of comparing a person to ideal notions of beauty, and the weapons are extreme descriptions: breasts the color of “dun” (a slightly brownish gray color, or a kind of horse); hair like black wires (which today carries powerful racial connotations, especially when contrasted with, say, smooth, blonde hair); and breath that “reeks.” By the end of the sonnet, Shakespeare’s case against “false compare” has won the day. But this is a poem, after all, and not a legal brief, and the cumulative effect is of someone real and uniquely beautiful entering into our midst, right now.

Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs 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;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare.