Who is sonnet 130 addressed to

The speaker praises traditional poetry and celebrates its power to express true love. The speaker mocks the ugliness of his mistress and wants to end their relationship. This poem is all about female beauty and our expectations and stereotypes about the way women ought to look…. Mostly, though, this poem is a gentle parody of traditional love poetry. Shakespeare uses this sonnet to poke fun at the kinds of exaggerated comparisons some poets of his day made when talking about their lovers.

These last two lines are the payoff for the whole poem. They serve as the punch-line for the joke. In the first quatrain, the speaker spends one line on each comparison between his mistress and something else the sun, coral, snow, and wires—the one positive thing in the whole poem some part of his mistress is like.

This creates the effect of an expanding and developing argument, and neatly prevents the poem—which does, after all, rely on a single kind of joke for its first twelve lines—from becoming stagnant. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Themes Motifs Symbols. Suggested Essay Topics. Shakespeare's Sonnet is a parody of the kind of insincere, sickly sweet love poems that authors have been writing and a lot of people have been hating for centuries. Now, don't get us wrong, we're not anti-love poetry and we can get into the sappy stuff sometimes too.

Animated Sonnet Someone's animated version of the poem. A little cheesy, but pretty cute too. Many Different Readings of Sonnet This site has a whole bunch of different recordings of the poem. It's fun to hear how different people approach it. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide.