Towards the end of the sixteenth century, sonnets were the most popular form of circulating poetry, and thus William Shakespeare (1564-1616) composes his own lengthy sonnet cycle, concentrating only on a handful of themes. With the traditional, or Italian, style dominating the poetic forum, Shakespeare composes Sonnet 130 a completely novel sonnet, altering the Italian form. Moreover in Sonnet 130, "My mistresses eyes are nothing like the sun," Shakespeare mocks the traditional expression of love, yet successfully expresses his own love.
             Shakespeare modifies the Italian sonnet, with four quatrains and an ending couplet, into what has become known as his own distinctive style of Shakespearean sonnets. But even that deviates from Sonnet 130. To begin, the sonnet instantly goes into comparisons of "his mistress" to various natural items of the world, none of which she matches. Her attributes, hair, eyes, lips, breasts, are all made with brutal comparison to a physical, or even more accurately, tangible aspect of the world, and the evaluation is less than promising. The opening line introduces the harsh reality that the woman's "eyes are nothing like the sun," immediately asserting the inferiority of the woman. The supple, shapely, snow-white image of the female bosom is also completely torn away with the rhetorical, "why then her breasts are dun," even gathering credibility with the known truth of "snow [being] white." The abrasive mediocrity that "black wires grow on her head" reveals that she is no mystical damsel with idealistic qualities such as flowing blonde hair or fair, soft skin.
             The next quatrain progresses from simple comparisons revealing her faults the author's first-hand experiences of beauty, making the assessments even more personal. He must have had intimate contact with the woman in the poem, as his descriptions of her breasts and the shading of her cheeks, as we will now see, are not simple things that any man w...