My Mistress' Eyes

William Shakespeare's poem: My Mistress' Eyes is ultimately about the speaker criticizing the lies of most love poetry and it's characterization of women, and the truth of his lover so contrasting from the perfect descriptions his ears have been fed. I found the poem to have a disappointed and somewhat harsh tone up until the final lines of the work. Throughout the gist of the work, the speaker describes his mistress as having "coral lips" over red, "dun breasts," "no roses in her cheeks," and "eyes nothing like the sun,"(Shakespeare,885). However negatively the mistress is portrayed thus, suddenly there is a shift symbolized with the words "and yet" which turns to the females side and womens' possible let down realization that men may not be who they thought either. I came to analyze the last two lines as meaning this because of the text: "And yet, by heaven. I think my love as rare as any she belied with false compare,"(Shakespeare,885). This shows the common similarity that men and women often share high expectations and are taught lies which reality cannot live up to. I found that men and women must share this same downfall led on by this belief.