LEXICAL MEANING:
The text presents very few words we could not find in an average
dictionary, or whose meaning may not be ascertained almost at once. The
following we are going to explain are probably among the few:
- ‘Mistress’ (1) is used here to refer to the woman the speaker is in
love with. The cotext does not permit us to determine if the woman
is also the speaker’s lover; and, in any case, it lacks the negative
connotations that his meaning may occasionally have.
- ‘Be’ (3) and ‘hath’ (10) are the archaic forms of the subjunctive and
the third person singular present tense respectively. The subjunctive
is now rarely used; the modern equivalent of ‘hath’ is ‘has’.
- ‘Why’ (3) is not used as a question, but a kind of quasi-colloquial
and mild exclamation, more or less equivalent to the more usual
‘well’.
- ‘Damask’d’ (5) may not be a familiar word both for the presence of
the apostrophe and its meaning. The apostrophe stands for an ellipted
vowel which should therefore not be pronounced –obviously, it
should be inferred that it might have been pronounced by some
speakers when the text was composed-. The word has several
possible meanings: it may refer to a combination of colours, or to the
presence of one single colour –pink- on the petals of the rose. The
choice will be indistinct in terms of the general meaning of the
sentence where the word occurs.
- ‘Rare’ (13) has several possible meanings. The word has a
misleading translation in its Spanish equivalent ‘raro/a’. In both
languages it is used to qualify something or someone as unusual or
uncommon; but whereas in Spanish its connotations are negative
(semantically close to ‘extraño/a’, in its reference to something that
should not be as it is), in English they may be positive, since its
meaning is normally attached to value. The Longman Dictionary of
Contemporary English has actually included a momentary about the
use of this word to explain how ‘uncommon and perhaps valuable
things are rare… Common useful things that we have not enough of
are scarce…’ This seems to be the most appropriate interpretation for
the use of the word in the text.
- ‘She’ (14) is used here as an equivalent of ‘woman’. Nowadays it is
used informally to refer to a person’s or animal’s sex, and almost
only in expressions of the kind ‘It is a she’ (in explicit or implicit
opposition to ‘It is a he’) therefore is an equivalent of ‘female’. In
the text it lacks the informality of the modern expression, although
we might assume that it has certain derogatory undertones,
applicable not to the poet’s mistress, but to the women who are
‘belied by false compare’.
TEXTUAL IMAGE AND COATING
This is a text that would permit a rather general definition of its contents. A
very elementary and relatively uncommitted one –and one which most of
its readers would agree- is that it is a description of the speaker’s mistressAn expanded definition concerning its format would probably also include
that the description is based on comparisons. And if pressed further, most
readers would also remark that it is a description based on what the woman
lacks –something no so easily accessible to many readers at first hand
simply because they unconsciously reject any consideration about apparent
paradoxes such as an un-descriptive description. As a matter of fact, most
readers would jump over this aspect and move straight into the conclusion
that, if she lacks all the qualities of the objects and entities to which she is
compared it is not because the text is undescriptive but because –and this
must be the author’s point- she must have the opposite qualities, therefore
she must be ugly.
When questioned about the poet’s statement in the last two lines, many
readers may say that it confirms the woman’s lack of beauty; and that
indicates that either she has other qualities not related to physical beauty or
that the speaker loves her in spite of her lack of beauty.
Only a few would readily accept that the speaker’s actual point is that no
comparison would do credit so –would be an accurate means to describehis mistress’ beauty: on other words, that it is not the lady’s beauty what is
under question but the means used to describe it. This view of the contents
is less easily accessed simply because the key to it is not at the beginning,
but at the end of the text: in other words, that the description is thematically
subordinated to the message transmitted in the last two lines.
The modulation of the contents is probably the best means to find out the
author’s purpose as regards the contents themselves. Most readers would
say that it is a parodic or comic description of an ugly woman, even if it is
of the woman the speaker is in love with. When related to the emotional
coating, some people can find it is a witty and funny reversal of
conventional descriptions of the loved person. Some others can find it
distasteful.
Probably, another reason why the alternative interpretation, which focuses
on the uselessness of false comparisons, does not have much acceptance, is
due to the fact that they find no justification (that is, no intentional
coherence) in a poet’s attack on comparisons.
A reader familiar with the conventions of late sixteenth-century English
verse would be able to explain how the comparisons of the kind used by the
poet were used to exalt the speaker’s beloved to what some people
considered over-exaggerated extremes. There is a sudden twist or
adversative turn in the description that the last two lines present, which
makes the whole text coherent rather than incoherent, and relevant,
precisely because the reader is also forced to reconsider what beauty is and
how it should be described. This point of view will be the basis of our
analysis and commentary.