By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’) has to be one of the top five most famous poems from the sequence of 154 sonnets, and it divides critical opinion. Is this poem a touching paean to inner beauty (opposed to superficiality) or is it misogynist trash? The jury is still out, as we’ll see. Anyway, before we proceed to our analysis of this divisive poem, here is Sonnet 130.