The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 130.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45108/sonnet-130-my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-like-the-sun.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

William Shakespeare is perhaps the most famous writer who ever wrote in English. Born in the small English town of Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, he was the son of a glovemaker. Shakespeare married young and had three children with his wife, Anne, before leaving Stratford-upon-Avon for an unknown destination. Ten years later, he resurfaced in London, working as an actor with the Lord Chamberlain's Men. The company was very successful, and Shakespeare was soon its primary playwright, authoring 36 plays that were well-received during his lifetime. He also wrote over 150 sonnets and several longer poems. After his death in 1616, his colleagues gathered his plays together and had them published as a folio, which allowed him to become, as Ben Jonson famously said, "not of an age, but for all time": still well known and studied even today.

Sonnet 130 is one of the "dark lady" sonnets, dedicated to a mysterious woman with a dark complexion and expressing passionate love for her. The sonnet relies on the poetic device of the blazon, popularized by Petrarch in the fourteenth century. The blazon is a form in which the speaker praises their beloved through each individual body part, usually by way of metaphor. However, in "Sonnet 130," Shakespeare disturbs the blazon to depict his "mistress" (1) as notably different from the ladies of other Petrarchan poems. Some would even argue that the speaker portrays the woman as unattractive.