Then the poet says that his love is neither as white as the snow, or her hairs as black as the night. And the poet here, with an air of innocence, keeps rejecting it. These extravagant comparisons that the poet rejects are the norms when it comes to praising one’s love. The sonnet starts with an almost confused statement saying that the poet’s lover’s eyes are not at all like the sun and her lips are not as red as a coral. If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun Ĭoral is far more red than her lips’ red And that’s what makes this sonnet so confusing and so powerful. Shakespeare takes a completely different way of expressing his ideas of beauty. The classical Petrarchan sonnets usually have this theme where the speaker’s love is compared to the breeze of spring in a hill valley or the smell of flower gardens. From the paraphrase, you might have noticed that Shakespeare, going contrary to his contemporaries, is rejecting the grand and unrealistic comparisons of one’s love.
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