Literary devices are techniques used by writers to enhance their work by creating special effects. To achieve this, authors use figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, personification, and others. Also, a scribe will employ analogy, symbolism, contrast, and various structural conventions. A writer's effective use of literary devices helps the reader to analyze, interpret, and appreciate the author's work.
The most obvious literary device Shakespeare uses in this sonnet is juxtaposition. In the first 12 lines, he deliberately contrasts his love's qualities with those that are ubiquitously used in praise of a lover's virtues. Shakespeare uses distinctively distorted images in opposition to the complimentary pictures lovers usually paint of those they love and desire.
The speaker, for example, mentions:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
At first reading, it appears as if the speaker is insulting his...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
lover. This trend is extended throughout the three quatrains. The reader may believe that the speaker despises the one he or she is speaking about and is expressing regret for being involved with the person so described. The rhymingcouplet, however, resolves the issue because the speaker states:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
It becomes apparent that the narrator's object of affection is a rarity and that the true nature and depth of her beauty can never be equaled by any pretentious comparison. Such an analogy is meaningless because the speaker's love is greater than any such comparison. Shakespeare accentuates how profound and important the speaker's commitment to his or her love truly is by using such extreme contrasts.
The second major literary device Shakespeare uses is the metaphor, which is an indirect comparison. He says, for example, that "her breasts are dun" and compares them to white snow. The speaker is effectively stating that his or her lover's breasts have a grayish, unappealing, texture. The metaphoric technique is used throughout the rest of the poem and directly supports the juxtaposition mentioned earlier.
In the final analysis, then, the poet's purpose is clear. Shakespeare wants to emphasize the fact that true love transcends the ordinary and mundane. Such love needs no reason for its existence, and attributing so-called idealistic and romanticized physical qualities to the object of one's affection is a meaningless and purposeless exercise.
The main literary device employed with Sonnet 130 is that of parody, In this sonnet, Shakespeare flaunts the blazon, a literary poem that praises the lover by cataloging the virtues and other sterling characteristics of the beloved. Thus, this anti-Petrarchan comparison offers a touch of humor to Shakespeare's sonnet sequence as the mistress is far from being a goddess or ideal.
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....
Here, too, in this sonnet Shakespeare mocks, or parodies, the conventions of the sonnet sequence in which there are three separate quatrains, which often are formed around a separate metaphor with a closing couplet that ties all ideas together. For, in Sonnet 130, the metaphors are in the negative and their crescendo is toward the worse rather than waxing superlative. For, the mistress's breasts are "dun," her hair like "wire," her breath "reeks," her voice is abrasive, and she "treads on the ground" like the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Finally, rather than tying the ideas together in the couplet, the poet offers a contradiction with his simile,
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.