"Any yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare."
My mistress' eyes
William Shakespeare really knows how to charm the ladies. After spending 12 lines of a poem seemingly insulting his mistress, he turns it all around in two lines. Those two lines prove that all along he was not insulting her, because he thinks she is wonderful and unique. The first twelve lines, you discover, are not meant to degrade her; they are to create his point that other men exagerrate and make false comparisons to flatter, while he is truthful and heartfelt. I find it ironic that the man who wrote works such as Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, which contain numerous cliches about love today made fun of others for their cliche comparisons! In retrospect, though, I realize that it was because his words were so epic that they became cliches. Poems like this are what made people fall in love with Shakespeare's writing. He managed to create a loving, caring tone through a stream of "insults"; what skill.
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