What is the use of imagery in Sonnet 130?

Imagery is description using any of the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell.

The imagery in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130" pokes fun at or parodies the conventionalized love imagery typical of a Petrarchan sonnet. In this sonnet, Shakespeare tries to get beyond the stale love language he had read so many times.

For example, he notes that his beloved's eyes are not, as is conventionally expressed, like the "sun." Her lips are paler than the "coral" color that is normally assigned to a beloved's mouth. He states that while a lover's skin is expected to be white like snow, her skin tone is more like "dun," a grayish-tan color. Likewise, her cheeks are not the vivid red color of "damasked" roses he has seen.

Shakespeare's speaker moves past sight imagery to scent images: his beloved's breath is not like "perfumes" but sometimes "reeks." He uses sound imagery as well: her voice is not like music, and she does not float on air but "treads on the ground."

For all this, the final couplet, in which the "turn" in this sonnet occurs, attests to the speaker's love, which is not dependent on an artificial notion of his beloved's beauty. He does not have to see her as a sex object to love her: his love is more than skin deep, and he accepts and loves her for what really she is.

The use of imagery in this poem is a subversion of the way in which nature imagery is generally used in romantic and courtly poetry from the Elizabethan era. The natural images Shakespeare uses are presented in opposition to the reality of what his mistress really looks, sounds, and smells like: the speaker alludes to "the sun" only to state that her eyes are "nothing like" it, and observes that "if snow be white," his mistress has breasts that are closer to "dun," or earth, in color. The effect of this is to criticize the tendency of poets to draw hyperbolic comparisons which, ultimately, tell us nothing about the people they describe.

The speaker has "seen roses damask'd, red and white," and it is exactly because he knows what roses look like that he does not compare "her cheeks" to them. His mistress's hair is like "black wires," and "coral is far more red than her lips' red." However, notably, what the speaker is expressing is that his love for his mistress is more earnest precisely because he "love[s] to hear her speak," while knowing all the time "that music hath a far more pleasing sound." Rather than idolizing his mistress and imagining her as a "goddess," the speaker is fully aware that his beloved "treads on the ground." He knows that she is human, and it is because he acknowledges these human qualities that their love is "rare," rather than being viewed through a lens of "false compare." Those who imagine their mistresses to be goddesses, the poem seems to suggest, do not love them for the people they truly are.

Sonnet 130 by Shakespeare is a parody of traditional love poetry.  The speaker is making fun of love poems that use hyperbole or excessive exaggeration by comparing the objects of their desires to natural wonders like the sun and moon and roses.  The poem uses imagery to express what his lover is not.  He does not mean this as a negative comment about his lover. The poem suggests that no one compares to natural wonders.  That's the point: it's silly to compare a woman to all of the wonders that he mentions in the poem, like so many poets do.

Nature, as well as his lover, are revealed in the poem by the use of imagery.  Some of the images follow:

• her eyes are nothing like the sun
• coral is far more red than her lips' red
• snow is white/breasts are dun
• hairs=wires/black wires grow out of her head
• roses mingling red and white/no roses in her cheeks
• delightful perfumes/her breath reeks
• her speaking/music more pleasing
• goddess walking/she treads on the ground

 The speaker uses imagery to bring love poetry back to reality, so to speak.  A lover doesn't have to be like the sun and coral and snow and roses, etc., to be loved. 

By showing what his lover is not with imagery, but also stating that he loves her as any poet has ever loved, the speaker brings realism to love poetry.

What are some examples of imagery in Sonnet 130?

Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130" has often been called something along the lines of a "winsome trifle" designed to be merely funny, which it is, but Shakespeare is also gently satirizing the conventions of the Petrarchan--as well as his own--sonnets in which the beauty of the subject is elevated to heights beyond the achievable.  The imagery of the sonnet centers on the beauty, or the lack thereof, of Shakespeare's mistress of the day, and the images are polar opposites of the conventional images of beauty we would expect to see in a sonnet.  Where we should see beauty, we see wires; where we should smell sweetness, we are repelled by reeking breath.

Aside from her brown skin (which should be "milky white") and wires for hair (which should be "smoothly-flowing tresses"), Shakespeare's mistress's cheeks demonstrate a color not found in nature:

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,/But no such roses see I in her cheeks.

The choice of rose imagery is especially clever here because red and white roses that are "damasked" are variegated, that is, they are streaked with red and white.  In addition to pointing up his mistress's lack of color, Shakespeare has chosen an image that would remind readers of the Wars of the Roses, a series of battles between the houses of Lancaster, whose symbol was the red rose, and York, whose symbol was the white rose.  The damasked rose, both red and white, is emblematic of the resolution of the war between Lancaster and York.  Given Shakespeare's acute awareness and use of symbols throughout his works, it is unlikely that he would overlook the chance to tie this humorous image to painful history.

Shakespeare has, in effect, created a very funny anti-sonnet: a sonnet in form, 14 lines with alternating end rhymes, with a closing couplet, all in iambic pentameter, but whose imagery mocks the conventions of both the Italian and English sonnet.

The main image is the description of his "mistress".   In the first quatrain, Shakespeare's imagery allows the reader to get an idea of what his mistress looks like.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red that her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hair be wires, balck wires grow on her head.

The woman is obviously not beautiful.  Her eyes do not shine, her lips are not a brilliant red, her skin is dull in comparison to pure white snow, and her hair is coarse.  Other images include the smell of her breath (not pleasant) and the non-musical quality of her voice.  However, in spite of these "flaws", he still finds her to be more loveable than any other.