I also like the way this poem stays free from chastising people. i think that the worse this sonnret gets is wher it says..."and beauty slandered with a bastard name." Do you think that whomever this sonnet is refering to might have been born out of wedlock?" what do you think is being spoken of in line 12. It could be false faces we paint on with makeup to hide our natural exterior physical flaws. have you considered that perhaps he may be refering to mask of personas that we put forth in certain situations to either protect ourselves or turn a bad scenerio into a better a situation?

i agree with you. i felt that shakespeare really did take the dark lady's beauty and explain it as something more. Back in their day, maybe she wasn't considered as beautiful but shakespeare was ahead of his time as saw that there is always more than the standards and that we can't abide by the standards because we worry too much about what people think instead of just loving ourselves for being born this way.

I really love this sonnet, because it doesn't involve a yearning for someone, or even a strong hatred. It's simply an opinion of beauty. I read the translation of this to get a better idea, and it's really interesting how in-depth Shakespeare goes. He ends up saying that beauty, once natural, has become artificial - sort of bridging the gap between the truly beautiful and the truly ugly, which disgraces the definition of beauty itself because people are indistinguishable. You'd think that beauty wouldn't be so important, because looks don't matter if you're just looking for sex, as Shakespeare has illustrated to us in some of his other sonnets. But, it all makes sense that beauty also has a deeper meaning of good versus bad personalities. In some way, maybe Shakespeare was trying to say that the line between the innocent and the guilty are blurred, when really everyone should look at the real goddess which is his mistress, and follow her example?