Audiobook · read by volunteers
Sonnet 130
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Read by Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Catharine Eastman, Chip, David Baker, Dilini Jayasinghe, Graham Williams, Ted McElroy, Kristin LeMoine, Kristen McQuillin, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023) · 17 chapters · 20 min
About the book
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. With that blunt opening line, Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 sets out to puncture the whole tradition of flowery love poetry. Her lips are not coral, her breasts are not snow, her hair is like wires, and yet, the poem concludes, she is as rare as any woman misrepresented by false comparisons. It is a joke, a tribute and a small manifesto in fourteen lines. Seventeen LibriVox volunteers read it here, each with a different sense of timing, and the joke lands a little differently every time. Every version is only a minute or so, so the whole collection takes about twenty minutes. A cheerful, witty set that shows how a poem can be heard in many ways. It is the kind of poem that survives being heard seventeen times, and keeps its charm.
Introduction
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is best known for his plays, but he also wrote a sequence of 154 sonnets, first published in 1609. Sonnet 130 is one of the most popular among them, because it takes a direct, humorous stance toward a literary convention. The poem's last two lines are the key, and the readers handle them very differently, which is one of the reasons to hear several versions in a row. Readers who know the sonnets only from the page may be surprised how funny this one can be when it is spoken aloud.
The Elizabethan love sonnet commonly compared the beloved to the sun, to coral, to roses and to snow. Shakespeare's poem refuses to do so. The speaker describes his mistress with deliberate realism: her eyes, her lips, her cheeks and her voice are measured against the clichés and found to be different. The final couplet turns the whole thing on its head, with a wry realism that is also a compliment. The poem offers a look into the Elizabethan ideal of womanly beauty and then reverses it. The poet's love, in the end, has no need of borrowed praise. This recording is a multi-version project. LibriVox volunteers made seventeen readings of the poem, for the weekly poetry project of the week of 5 March 2006. There are 17 short chapters, one per version, and the set lasts about twenty minutes. Seventeen volunteers took part, one for each version.
The sonnet is a good test of a reader's tone, because the humour depends on timing and the affection depends on restraint. Hearing seventeen solutions to the problem is a pleasure.
It is a short, funny and ultimately tender listen.
Public domain
William Shakespeare died in 1616: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text