A sonnet is a 14-line poem usually written in iambic pentameter. They often take on the rhyme scheme of the English or Italian forms. “My mistress's eyes are not like the sun” by William Shakespeare is from 1609 and is an English sonnet. This Shakespearean sonnet expresses that women do not have to look like flowers or the sun to be beautiful because true love does not need perfect surroundings or people as we are human and imperfection is nothing to be ashamed of; true love comes from the heart. "My mistress's eyes are not like the sun" is a traditional English poem, also known as a Shakespearean sonnet. The rhyme scheme of this poem is: a,b,a,b,c,d,c,d,e,f,e,f,g,g, containing 3 quatrains and a couplet. A quatrain is a 4-line stanza (a poetic paragraph) and a couplet is a 2-line rhyme. This sonnet compares a woman to a number of other beauties, but it seems that everything about her is not good enough for the writer. These comparisons can be seen throughout the poem: in the first line, when it is said that his eyes are "not at all like the sun" (Shakespeare 1126), meaning that his eyes could be more beautiful. In the second line with: her lips are less red than coral, saying that her lips are pale. Also that her breasts are brown in color, compared once again to the white of snow, and at the end of the first quatrain we read: "If the hair be threads, black threads grow on her head", (1126) this is a saying self-explanatory that his hair is like black threads on his head. In the second quatrain, the speaker maintains his romanticism by saying that he has seen roses separated by color into red and white, but cannot see any rose on his lover's cheeks; and even the “stinking” (1126) breath of his mistress is less desirable...... middle of paper ......if he did not finish reading the poem, then he would ask for a divorce because he is only at end you can fully understand this poem and what the speaker is trying to say by making all these comparisons. Throughout the poem, the speaker seems to see the glass as half empty instead of half full because he likes some of the qualities his woman has, but then turns it around as if her breath isn't as pleasant as the scent or the way she she speaks. The rhetorical structure of Shakespeare's "My mistress's eyes are not like the sun" is important because it creates the effect of an expanding and developing argument and prevents the poem from becoming stagnant by relying on humorous comparisons between the speaker's lover with different objects and things for its first twelve lines, which makes the sonnet flow smoothly while still stating a clear theme.