Poetry Packet

       The sonnet "130" by Shakespeare characterizes the idea that "love is blind."  The author discusses all the negative aspects of his lover by comparing her to good, beautiful things and then saying she looks nothing like them.  "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red..."  It would be a compliment to tell a woman that her eyes sparkle like the sun but instead the author says that his lover's eyes specifically do NOT sparkle like the suns.  Then, he goes on to say that her lips are not as red as that of coral, a complexion thought pretty by men but not possessed by her.  As if these points were not clear enough, he goes on to say later, "And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks."  Now, not only is he saying she has unremarkable eyes and dull lips, but he also has the nerve to say his lover has bad breath!  At this point he should be sleeping on the couch, but then he changes directions at the end revealing the real theme of the sonnet.  "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare!"  He saves himself with these two lines by showing that the point of the sonnet was that he loves her regardless of her appearance, not because of her appearance (a trait that is hard to find in men).
      The sonnet "Dim Lady" by Harryette Mullen also focuses on love being blind.  "Today's special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser....And in some minty-fresh mouthwashes there is more sweetness than in the garlic breeze my main squeeze wheezes."  I may be wrong, but generally girls do not like to hear that their lips aren't an attention getter to their man or that they have awful breath.  The author is literally ragging on his little woman's  hair, lips, eyes, breath, chest, and complexion while poems tend to have a romantic tinge to them. "And yet, by gosh, my scrumptious Twinkie has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who's hyped beyond belief."  This is where the author digs himself out of the hole he had made in the previous lines of the sonnet.  These lines mean that maybe she does not meet the standards for what society calls pretty, but that she has a uniqueness about her that makes her prettier and hotter than society's prettiest girl.  This is a twisted way of giving a very sincere and heartfelt compliment, but in the end it does indeed succeed. 
      These two sonnets, although written by different authors in different time periods, have a lot in common.  Both deal with the idea that love is blind.  The differences between the two is that that Mullen's sonnet takes a very blunt approach that we can apply to our time period whereas Shakespeare takes the softer approach.  Mullen's diction causes "Dim Lady" to have a more severe negative connotation as well as it almost makes him sound like he is demeaning his lover by referring to her as a child.  Shakespeare uses words like "damasked" and "far more pleasing sound" whereas Mullen's uses words such as "...but no such picnic colors do I see in her mug."  In conclusion the poems convey a similar message besides Mullen's uses a more brutal diction and is obviously written in a more contemporary time.