Analysis of My mistress’ eyes by William Shakespeare

In this sonnet, which belongs to the sequence addressed to the “dark lady”, Shakespeare
describes his lover in a very unconventional way. Firstly, he describes her eyes by saying
that they are not as bright as the sun. Secondly, her lips which are not as red as coral. Then,
her breasts which appear to be dun. In the last line of the first quatrain, Shakespeare
presents her hair as black wires on her head. The description continues in the second
stanza where Shakespeare states that her cheeks are not as red as roses and her breath is
not as perfume. In the third stanza, Shakespeare continues by declaring that he loves her
way of speaking even if her voice is not as music and the way she walks does not belong to
a goddess, because she sets her feet on the ground, so she’s a human being. In the final
couplet, which is introduced by a turning point with the word “And”, he says that even if she’s
not as beautiful as she could be he loves her so much and truly that she cannot be
compared to the other beautiful women idealised by other poets, such as Petrarch in Dolce
Stil Novo. Shakespeare provides a much more realistic description of his lover and he
criticises the idealised figure of the woman in the Petrarchan form. The sonnet is written in
iambic pentameter (10 syllables, 5 unstressed and 5 stressed) and the rhyme scheme is the
typical pattern of Shakespeare form (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG). The figures of speech we can
find are the following: in line 1 a simile “nothing like the sun”; in lines 2 there is the repetition
of the word “red”; in line 4 there is the repetition of word “wires”; in lines 9-11 there is the
repetition of the pronoun “I”; in lines 4-5 there is an assonance, a repetition in which the
sound of the vowel is the same while the consonants are different, of the words “wires” and
“white”.