The first eight lines of Sonnet 127 in the 1609 Quarto
Q1
Q2
Q3
C
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty slander’d with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on nature’s power,
Fairing the foul with art’s false borrow’d face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profan’d, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem: Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe, That every tongue says beauty should look so.
4
8
12
14
—William Shakespeare[1]
Sonnet 127 of Shakespeare's sonnets (1609) is the first of the Dark Lady sequence (sonnets 127–152), called so because the poems make it clear that the speaker's mistress has black hair and eyes and dark skin.[2] In this poem the speaker finds himself attracted to a woman who is not beautiful in the conventional sense, and explains it by declaring that because of cosmetics one can no longer discern between true and false beauties, so that the true beauties have been denigrated and out of favour.[3]
^Pooler, C[harles] Knox, ed. (1918). The Works of Shakespeare: Sonnets. The Arden Shakespeare [1st series]. London: Methuen & Company. OCLC 4770201.
^Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 540.
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