My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head
Sonnet 130 Shakespeare.
Poems dedicated to an idealized and worshipped mistress Petrarch celebrates her beauty, value, and perfection in the sonnets with an incredible diversity of metaphors based mostly on natural beauties. These analogies had already become cliché (as they still are now), but they were still the recognized strategy for composing love poetry in Shakespeare’s day. As a result, poetry tended to create excessively idealizing parallels between nature and the poet’s beloved that were absolutely ludicrous if considered literally. My mistress has the eyes of the sun, the lips of coral, the cheeks of flowers, the breasts of snow, the voice of song, she is a goddess.
