Contrasting love poems

The two poems I have picked are vastly different from one another; after all, one is a kind of satire of the other. “She Walks in Beauty” and “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” written by Lord Byron and Shakespeare respectively, are two completely different kinds of love poems. “She Walks in Beauty” is written just how you would expect a love poem to be written: the speaker describes his love feature by feature, comparing each aspect of her to some beautiful thing, like the moon or something equally silly. “And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes,” he writes, oxytocin-filled (stay away from that stuff if you can). Right on schedule, he describes how pretty her “raven tresses” are and her sweet smile and so forth. It seems that the majority of poems describing the object of a man’s affection tend to glorify more often the woman’s physical traits over her strength of character or intelligence. Incidentally, this is just the sort of poem Shakespeare mocks in his sonnet. Unlike Lord Byron, he admits that his lady love’s physical attributes don’t merit the typical kind of sappy love poem he’s expected to write. In fact, he can’t compare his lady to any kind of beautiful thing, he says; her lips aren’t as red as coral, her skin isn’t silky white, she doesn’t walk like a goddess or some other heavenly creature—hell, she doesn’t even smell all that good. But just because he can’t describe her in that sappy, superficial way other poets might, doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her just as much, or that any love is better than theirs: “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/As any she belied with false compare.”

I relate more to Shakespeare’s poem. I don’t think I’m qualified to be described in the way Byron describes his lady; honestly, I don’t know a lot of girls/women myself that can quite live up to that description. The average person looks, well, average. Most of us don’t have some kind of magical interplay going on in our eyes like Byron’s woman does.  But that shouldn’t mean we’re not just as worthy of having the same kind of loving relationship. Just because I don’t have eloquence on my eyebrows like Lord Byron’s lady does doesn’t mean I’m not worthy of equally valid love; that goes for any other girl who doesn’t have the same kind of goddess-like smile this woman does. None of us is an innocent ray of sunshine like the women described in typical love poems, after all. At least, I know I’m definitely not.