112
130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun-
Coral is far more red than her lips' red-
4
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
8 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;
12 My mistress when she walk~ treads on the ground.
And yet by heav'n I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare,
131
Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
4
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;
For well thou know'st to my dear doting heart
Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel.
Yet in good faith some say that thee behold
Thy face hath not the pow'r to make love groan;
To say they err I dare not be so bold,
8 Although I swear it to myself alone.
And to be sure that is not false I swear
A thousand groans but thinking on thy face
One on another's neck do witness bear
12 Thy black is fairest in my judgement's place.
In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,
And thence this slander as I think proceeds.
132
Thine eyes I love, and they as pitying me,
4
Knowing thy heart torment me with disdain,
Have put on black, and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
SO NN E't s.
13 0
M y Millres eyes are nothing like the Sunne,
C urrall is farre more red,then her lips red,
lffr.oV\' be \'\ hite, ""hy thell her breRs arc dun:
lfhaires be wiers,black wiers grow en her head:
J haue [cene Rofes damaskt,fed and "hite,
But no fuch Rafes fce I in her checkes.
And in fome perfume, is there morc delight,
Then in the breath that from my MiRres reekes.
I laue toheare her fpeakc,yetwcll I know,
That Muficke hath a farre more pleafmg found:
I graunt I n(uer faw a godddfe goe,
My Mifires when thee walkes treads on the ground.
And yet by heauen I thinke my loue as rare,
As any the beIi'd with falfe compare.
13[
T Hou art as tiranous,fo as thou art,
As thofe whole beauties proudly make them cr"el~
For well thou know'ft to my deare doting hart
Thou art the faireR and moll precious Iewell.
Yet in good faith fame fay that thee behold,
Thy face hath not the power to make laue gram.
To fay they erre,l dare not be fa bold,
Although 1fweare it to my felfe alone.
And to -be fure thatis not falfe I fweare
A thoufand grones but thinking on thy face,
Q.le on anothers necke do witndfe beare
Thy blacke is fairell in·my iudgements place.
1n nothing :lrt dlou blacke faue in thy deeds.
And thence this fiaunder as I thinke proceeds.
1j7.
T Hine des I Ioue)and' they as pittying me,
Knowing thy heart torment me with difdaint"~
Haue put on black,and louing mourner5 bee,
Looking With pretty ruth vpon my paine.
Aald
45 2 SONNET 130

"bait"; the line-end pause insures that. Even for modern readers, punctuation
does not govern the logic of a sentence except in rare cases where syntax and
general context do not dictate the logic. Mistakes in punctuation are usually
obvious; if punctuation had the powers Graves and Riding assume for it, would
we not misread all the sentences in which we note mispunctuation or in which
we simply overlook misplaced commas and missing question marks.
Graves and Riding conclude their essay by citing Quince's prologue to
"Piramus and Thisby" (M N D V.i. I 08ff.: "If we offend, it is with our good will. /
That you should think, we come not to offend, / But with good will. . . . ").
The speech prompts Quince's audience of courtiers to make jokes about his bad
punctuation. Graves and Riding take the passage as evidence for their thesis.
Note, however, that the opening lines of Quince's prologue would have the
same immediate effect if the period after "our good will" and the commas after
"think" and "offend" were removed:
If we offend, it is with our good will
That you should think we come not to offend
But with good will.
The line-end pause after "our good will," the effect that the resultant reading of
the first line has on "That you should think," and the ellipsis between "think"
and "we," all operate to an effect that. the punctuation merely confirms. If
Quince, a writer with a poor ear for syntactic signals, had had another and more
talented actor to speak his prologue, the actor would have seen the misdirec-
tions in which the syntax leads a,?-d compensated with careful phrasing (e.g. by
hurrying across the stop at the end of the first line and stressing "But" in the
third). If Quince's prologue were not obviously an intentional burlesque, an
editor might repunctuate the lines in an inevitably unsuccessful attempt to make
them say what Quince ought to be saying in a gracious prologue. Editors do in
fact do that with many passages in the sonnets that use gentler versions of the
techniques Shakespeare used in making Quince ridiculous; the editors usually
fail and have to write notes claiming success. Such editors are the targets for
Graves and Riding, but Graves and Riding disable themselves by joining their
adversaries in overestimating the power of punctuation and the efficacy of logic
over syntactic habit, and in underestimating the power of idiom to lead a reader
where he expects it to lead him. Shakespeare's sonnets are full of sentences in
which the speaker is like Quince in that the signals inherent in his situation and
the signals inherent in his syntax, diction, and idiom are at cross purposes. Edi-
tors and critics should avoid trying to strengthen some signals and diminish
others, but they do no one a service if they augment Shakespeare's plentiful
supply of linguistic crises by fabricating them in poems like 129.

SONNET 130

Compare sonnet 21.

This poem, a winsome trifle, is easily distorted into a solemn critical state-
ment about sonnet conventions. The poem does gently mock the thoughtless,

A literal portrait of a beauty, from The Extravagant Shepherd (1654), re-

,,"~rl .. rprl hv n"rIl.;,,;nn of Th" Iluntin!!ton Lihrary. San Marino. California.
454 SONNET 130
mechanical application of the standard Petrarchan metaphors, but the speaker's'
clown act in taking hyperbolic metaphors literally appears to have no target
and no aim but to be funny. (See the accompanying illustration from John
Davies's The Extravagant Shepherd [I 654].) The poem is both a wry reminder
that all beloved ladies are something other and something less than they are said
to be and, by virtue of the information given in sonnet 127, a comic acknowledg-
ment that this beloved lady is to the ladies praised by other poets as those ladies
are to heavenly bodies, roses, and goddesses. (Compare lines 1-4 of the Row-
lands poem quoted in 144.12, note.)
I. Compare 2Gent IlLi.88: "her sun-bright eye," and note the proverb "No
more like than black is to white" (Tilley, B438). nothing in no way, not at all
(compare 123.3). the sun Compare 49.6, and see 132.5 and note.
3. dun dull grayish-tan. (Note that the line says only that her breasts are dun
as compared with the flat white of snow; the thrust of the line is at least as much
toward mocking inexact hyperbolic metaphor and illustrating the foolishness of
taking hyperbole literally as toward depreciating the lady's complexion.)
4. wires = monosyllabic. Comparisons of golden hair to goldeh wires were
traditional and commonplace (see Variorum I, 334-35). To modern readers, at
home in a world of industrial wiring and wire fences, the simile seems grotesque.
To Renaissance writers and readers, the comparison of hair to wires apparently
suggested a likeness to threads of beaten gold used in jewelry (compare Bar-
tholomew Griffin, Fidessa [1596], 39.1: "My lady's hair is threads of beaten
gold," and Thomas Watson, Hecatompathia [1582], 7.2: "Her yell owe lockes
exceede the beaten goulde"; both poems are good examples of the tradition this
sonnet plays on).
5. damasked dappled. (Willen and Reed say: " 'To damask' meant to orna-
ment with a variegated pattern; a damask rose was 'of a color betwixt red and
white.' Shakespeare seems to exploit both meanings." Ingram and Redpath
point out that a subsidiary train of associations might be of the soft texture of
silk damask and of rose petals. red and white See 98.9-10, note.
7. some The speaker's careful qualification, his unwillingness to say that all
perfumes are sweeter than his mistress' breath, gives the line a tone of wry irony.
8. reeks breathes forth, emanates. (A modern reader must be cautioned
against hearing this word as the simple insult it would be if a modern writer had
written the line; the primary energy of "to reek" and "a reek" was still in com-
municating the ideas of emitting vapor and of vapor emitted; the narrow modern
senses, "to stink" and "a stench," which focus attention on the quality of vapor
emitted, do not emerge until the late seventeenth century. However, commen-
tators often over-caution modern readers: both the verb and the noun were
already well on their way toward their modern meanings in Shakespeare's time;
although "to reek" and "a reek" could be used neutrally [e.g. Lucrece 1377:
"The red blood reek'd to shQw the painter's strife," and this OED example from
1542: "perfume being poured . . . reeketh into the air"], both words were so
consistently used with reference to specifically bad-smelling vapors or in situa-
tions that are otherwise repUlsive that reeks here would have carried suggestions
of evil-smelling breath. Compare Cymb Lii.I-3-"Sir, I would advise you to
shift a shirt; the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice"-or any
SONNET 131 455
other of the twelve uses of "reek" and related words in the plays; also note the
contexts of OED's examples before 1700.)
9. yet well I know Note the substantively irrelevant echo of 129.13; see also
well thou know'st in 131.3.
II. go walk (as in 51.14 and Lear l.iv. 120: "Ride more than thou goest").
Tucker notes that "to 'walk like a goddess' is at least as old as Virgil's vera
incessu patuit dea [in her gait she was revealed as a true goddess]," the conclusion
of one of the most echoed passages in Renaissance literature of compliment,
Aeneid 1.326-405.
13. by heal' '11 = a casual intensifying oath. Note, however, that it is a blunt
country cousin to the rhetorical gestures of elegant courtly poets who use heav'l1
itself for ornament (21.3); it undercuts the speaker's rhetorical self-righteous-
ness and prepares for the compliment it introduces. (Shakespeare may have ex-
pected particularly keen readers to hear an ironic, logically inconsistent pun on
"put alongside heaven," "compared with heaven. ") rare splendid, marvelous
(with a play on "unusual").
14. she woman (as in TN I.v.225: "Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive").
false (1) inappropriate, erroneously chosen, misused; (2) artificial; (3) lying;
(4) insincere .. compare comparison (with a possible play on "a compare"
meaning "a compeer," "an equal"; see 21 .5, note).
SONNET 131
I. so as just as. (Note the complicatedly chiasmic echo of Thou art as and
the last syllable of tyrannous in so as thou art.)
2. proudly Syntactically, proudly modifies, and thus to a degree personifies,
beauties; the traditional behavior pattern-the exhibition of "daunger" by the
beloved lady-draws proudly to modifying cruel by synesis. cruel = dis-
syllabic; see 129.4, note.
3. well thou know'st See 130.9, note. dear (I) tender, loving (see 31.6,
note), tenderly, lovingly, fondly (for dear used adverbially, see 115.2); (2) earnest
(31.6, note), earnestly, eagerly; (3) painful (compare RII !.iii.I51: "thy dear
II exile"), painfully, sorely. Ingram and Redpath point out that the adverbial
action of dear carries suggestions of "at a high price"; it thus suggests that the
speaker's doting costs him dearly in material or spiritual expense or in both
(compare MofV Ill.ii.315: "Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear").
doting (l) infatuated; (2) foolish, addled.
4. most precious = an echo of dear in line 3, but of a sense that dear does not
quite carry there.
5. ill goodfaUh (I) indeed, verily (a mere interjection indicating the speaker's
intensity); (2) speaking in good faith (an adverbial phrase modifying say and
indicating that the sayers speak the truth). (Many editors set the phrase off-in
commas, but its double action occurs in any case; compare 141.1. Moreover,
since this phrase leads into some say, ill goodfaith can momentarily register as a
direct quotation of a gossiping remark about the beloved: " 'In good faith,' some
say . . . . ")
5-6. some say that thee behold / Thy face hath . .. some who behold you