In Shakespeare’s day, these metaphors had already become cliché. In the sonnets, Petrarch praises her beauty, her worth, and her perfection using an extraordinary variety of metaphors based largely on natural beauties. Petrarch’s famous sonnet sequence was written as a series of love poems to an idealized and idolized mistress named Laura.

Most sonnet sequences in Elizabethan England were modeled after that of Petrarch. This sonnet, one of Shakespeare’s most famous, plays an elaborate joke on the conventions of love poetry common to Shakespeare’s day, and even today. Many poets of the time used this term as a benchmark of beauty. One final note: To Elizabethan readers, Shakespeare’s comparison of hair to ‘wires’ would refer to the finely-spun gold threads woven into fancy hair nets. Shakespeare ends the sonnet by proclaiming his love for his mistress despite her lack of beauty. In Sonnet 130, the references to such objects of perfection are indeed present, but they are there to illustrate that his lover is not as beautiful. In many poems the poet’s lover is as beautiful and, at times, more beautiful than the finest pearls, diamonds, rubies, and silk. Sonnet 130 is clearly a parody of the conventional love sonnet, made popular by Petrarch. Sonnet 130 is the poet’s pragmatic tribute to his uncomely mistress, commonly referred to as the dark lady because of her dun complexion. With false compare (14): i.e., by unbelievable, ridiculous comparisons.

Is sonnet 130 in iambic pentameter