Germinated in anonymous Middle English texts, the subversion of the classical poetic representation of female beauty as blonde and blue-eyed took on new meaning in the era of exploration under the guidance of the sonnets Sidney and Shakespeare. "Alison's" brown hair no longer just served to distinguish her from the pack; the new "Dark Lady's" features became more pronounced and blotchy, and her eroticized associations with the foreignness of the New World became more explicit through conceits of colonization. However, the evolving dichotomy between fairness and blackness was not so revolutionary; indeed, Sidney and Shakespeare praised the virtues of fairness with the same degree of passion as their predecessors, albeit in disguised form. To counteract the external darkness of their lovers, the poets identify an internal lightness that radiates beyond the funereal veil of hair or raven eyes or jet eyes, acceptable only if there is an innate luminosity that illuminates the sensuality of the superficial. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Most poems that address the light/dark antithesis choose at some point to make an open statement that embraces or undermines the dichotomy and sets the stage for the rest of the poem. Dichotomous lines tend not to be as simple as they suggest. “I can love both light and brown,” from John Donne's “The Indifferent,” seems to blur the line between colors, but by revealing the graceful equanimity of his desire, Donne implicitly reinforces brown's aesthetic inferiority. Shakespeare parodies the antiquated vexations, which he acknowledges in Sonnet 127: "In old age, black was not considered beautiful" (1). In Sonnet 130, he mocks the blazon that has for so long relied on parallels between the poet's object of affection and the fairness or brightness of nature: “My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun; / The coral is much redder than her red lips;/ If the snow is white, then her breasts are gray;/ If her hair is threads, black threads grow on her head,/ I have seen damask roses, red and white ,/ But I see no such roses on his cheeks" (1-6). The range of settings: sky, sea, earth, garden illustrates the variety of sources to which a poet can turn for analogies of fairness, and the structure of comparison “if, then,” often punctuated by a comma in the middle of a line, physically divides the sonnet into a series of textual oppositions that highlight the facile nature of the light/dark dichotomy. Kim Hall, in “Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England,” explains the blazon as a tool for reinforcing male superiority: “Sonneteers establish their power over female matter and their poetic skill by drawing on the blazon's dismembering power.” Shakespeare's brazen manipulation of dismemberment reverses the power struggle, as he is still captivated by his mistress's uneven beauty. This may ridicule the dichotomy, but it does little to overturn it; Shakespeare admits that his blackness is as visually unattractive as "the breath that stinks from my mistress" (8). Shakespeare supports the dichotomy in Sonnet 147, applying his male friend's immorality to the time-tested analogies of hell and night: "For I have sworn thee fair, and held thee bright, / That art black as hell, dark as the night" (13-14). That the poet “swore” to the rightness of his friend not only describes his trust, but that betrayal exposes the blasphemy of darkness. Sidney, in his sonnet cycle "Astrophil and Stella", also uses divisionbetween day and night, but it alters Shakespeare's conception. In Sonnet 89, the modified Petrarchan arrangement serves as the perfect rhyme scheme in which to muddle the dichotomy. Ending each line with "night" or "day", the "abba abba" pattern of the first two quatrains captures the cyclical pattern of demarcations of dark and light. The final sestina, however, alternates the rhyme scheme with "ababab" and merges the two. For Astrophil, Stella's absence has made day and night indistinguishable, as one seeps into the other: "the most troublesome night / With the darkest shadow surpasses my day" (1-2). The zeugma in “Every day seems long and longs for a long night” states the connection between Astrophil's bored daytime desires and “The night, equally dull, [which] courts the approaching day” (5-6). The amalgam becomes more evident in the sextet, in which one side has taken and amplified the unattractive qualities of the other: "(While no night is darker than my day, / Nor no day less still than my night)" ( 10-11). The dichotomy coalesces, despite the uninviting nature of its metamorphosis: "With such a bad mixture of my night and my day / That, living thus in the blackest winter night, / I feel the flames of the hottest summer day" (12 -14). The “blackest night of winter” is still doomed, but Sidney pierces the traditional dichotomy in his unflattering depiction of bright summer days. Sidney portrays his dissolution of the night/day dichotomy in Sonnet 91: "beautiful thee, my Sun, so spread/With absence 'veil, I live in the night of Sorrow" (4-5). Stella's shining sunny presence reiterates the traditional relationship between women's beauty and nature that Shakespeare mocked in Sonnet 130. Shakespeare may, in fact, be basking in a bit of self-parody with his anti-blazon, as he often used the sun to illuminate the beauty of his male friend. In Sonnet 18, he draws a direct connection between the brightness of the sun and the constant light color of the subject's skin: "Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines / And often his golden complexion is dimmed / And every fair from fair to times declines" (5 -6). As in Sonnet 15, in which time causes the "day of youth to decay into a dirty night" (12), darkness takes on a polluted connotation, Sonnet 20 highlights the purity of the male friend's lightness and self-control in opposition to women's unbridled passions: "An eye brighter than theirs, less false in rolling?/A man in all colors in his control" (5, 7). Shakespeare also probes the false surface of cosmetic beauty in Sonnet 127. He laments that fair beauty is now “slandered with bastard shame,” once again condemning the illegitimate sexuality of blackness (4). Makeup, which usurps “the power of nature, / Clothing the disgusting with a false face borrowed from art,” commits sacrilege against natural beauty: “Sweet beauty has no name, no holy bower, / But is profaned unless he lives in disgrace" (5-8). The lost pity of the fair beauty is a play on words; “disgrace” means shame, detachment from the good graces of God, and lack of aesthetic grace. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay However, Shakespeare cannot deny a certain psychological attraction to this sinful model that disrupts the fair archetype. In Sonnet 144, he delves into the light and dark sides of the spiritual psyche, transforming his male friend, "a very handsome man," and the Dark Lady, "a sick colored woman," into his good and bad conscience (3-4 ). Although Norton defines the sentence "But both being from me" as the couple being "far from" the speaker, the sentence can also imply that the.