As part of our poetry unit, all my classes read and compared Shakespeare's sonnets 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") and 130 this week before writing their own sonnets. Sonnet 130 is my favorite, and I love how well students connect with Sonnet 130 once we begin talking about it.
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 damasked, 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.
At first they couldn't believe how the speaker trashes his mistress. (I had to explain that "mistress does not necessarily mean "side chick." Yes, I phrased it like that, which made them all laugh.) We talked about how she is described in each line and about beauty standards both in Elizabethan England and now. When we got to the ninth line, I underlined "I love to hear her speak," which seems to be the closest the speaker has come to a compliment by that point, although he then says music is more pleasing. Then we talked about how the speaker admits his love is no goddess; she does not fit any ideal standard of beauty and is not high above others but rather treads on the ground. In other words, this woman is fully human as the list of "flaws" has already shown. Finally, we looked at the couplet, which I had explained provides a conclusion or a surprising twist in the sonnet form, and it was like lightbulbs going on all over the room every time.
After looking more closely at Sonnet 130, I asked them, "Which sonnet would you rather have written for you?" Most of them said 130, but some clung to the more pleasant description of 18 until I pointed out the last two words of 130: "false compare." "Who can actually achieve that level of perfection? Who wants to live constantly trying to meet that standard?" I asked. That quickly put everyone on the 130 side, and then I took them back to "I love to hear her speak yet well I know/That music hath a far more pleasing sound."
It's noteworthy that the one compliment the speaker pays his mistress prior to the couplet is that he loves to hear her speak. Rather than praising her physical beauty and comparing it to some arbitrary and unattainable standard, he says he loves to hear her speak, even if he knows her voice does not have the same pleasing quality as music. "How many of you," I asked, "want the people you care about to be interested in what you have to say?" They all nodded in unison, their eyes on me, cell phones and Chromebooks forgotten (miracle of miracles!), if only for a brief moment. "How many of you want to be loved and remembered for what you say and think and for who you are on the inside instead of how you look on the outside?
If I could have captured the looks on their faces then to show it to you now, no one would ever ask again why we should study literature or whether Shakespeare is still relevant today. (At least no adult would.) It was the look of not only profound revelation and full understanding of a text but also the realization that the text understands them. If you don't know how it is possible that a book or poem--an inanimate object, whether brought into being yesterday or centuries ago--can understand a living, breathing human, let alone a classroom of teenagers, I pity you because it can only mean that you have not experienced this phenomenon for yourself. It is a moment of true connection between one human heart or mind and another and also between all humankind. To know that another person and, in fact, may people, have had and do have the same thoughts and feelings as you (especially as a teenager) makes the world a much less lonely place. It makes our burdens more bearable and the world at once smaller and ever-expanding.
P.S. Dear students, I do love to hear you speak, even if I frequently have to tell you to shut up so we can get to what we are supposed to be learning and speaking about. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas about what we are studying in class and for the times you trust me enough to talk about what is going on in your lives or what is important to you beyond school. I love the people you are on the inside and all the ways you are showing it more and more each day on the outside. You are just the sort of lovely that belies all false compare.
