Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
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;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

I guess one is supposed to read into this as “Love is in the eye of the beholder”? Shakespeare writes this beautiful sonnet about the unorthodox/unique beauty of his lover. He seemingly extols the virtues of what makes this woman ordinary, human, unattractive and maybe even ugly to the average person. But he is genuinely in love with her and finds her beautiful like any other person would view a model or any other woman who is considered to be beautiful by the mainstream.

My real thought about this sonnet is that Shakespeare was a player and he was tired of philandering with the British elite and attractive. He hooked up with this chic from the local pub and went home with her. The next morning they talked a little in bed and he realized that she was pretty cool. They hung out for awhile and then at the peak of their relationship, he wrote this sonnet. But then, after awhile, they probably broke up, but this work was so powerful, that it was immortalized in British Literature. So be it. That’s cool. I personally prefer Sonnet 116:

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Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.