William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 mocks the conventions of the showy and flowery courtly sonnets in its realistic portrayal of his mistress. Synopsis Sonnet 130 satirizes the concept of ideal beauty that was a convention of literature and art in general during the Elizabethan era. Influences originating with the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome had established a tradition of this, which continued in Europe's customs of courtly love and in courtly poetry, and the work of poets such as Petrarch. It was customary to praise the beauty of the object of one's affections with comparisons to beautiful things found in nature and heaven, such as stars in the night sky, the golden light of the rising sun, or red roses. The images conjured by Shakespeare were common ones that would have been well-recognized by a reader or listener of this sonnet. Shakespeare satirizes the hyperbole of the allusions used by conventional poets, which even by the Elizabethan era, had become cliché, predictable, and uninspiring. This sonnet compares the poet's mistress to a number of natural beauties; each time making a point of his mistress' obvious inadequacy in such comparisons; she cannot hope to stand up to the beauties of the natural world. The first two quatrains compare the speaker's mistress to aspects of nature, such as snow or coral; each comparison ending unflatteringly for the mistress. In the final couplet, the speaker proclaims his love for his mistress by declaring that he makes no false comparisons, the implication being that other poets do precisely that. Shakespeare's sonnet aims to do the opposite, by indicating that his mistress is the ideal object of his affections because of her genuine qualities, and that she is more worthy of his love than the paramours of other poets who are more fanciful. Structure Sonnet 130 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form ABAB CDCD EFEF GG and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The 1st line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: × / × / × / × / × / My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / × × / × / × / × / Coral is far more red than her lips' red: (130.1-2) / =