Honesty and Art

Sonnet 130 is about far more than the question of whether or not a particular woman is beautiful, or even a discussion or depiction of what beauty is. It also functions as a thoughtful critique of the role that art plays in society, and as an incisive satire of hypocrisy in love.

One of the questions the poem poses is what the difference is between a metaphor (using a direct comparison of one thing to another) and a lie. Shakespeare does this by carefully undermining a number of stock metaphors from love poetry. An intriguing facet of this comparison is how little these comparisons have changed in the intervening centuries — though we are reading this poem more than four hundred years after it was written, we can easily recognize the romantic tropes that Shakespeare skewers in this sonnet. A contemporary love song could compare eyes...