Dun is a word often used to describe the color of a horse, and definitely not the kind of thing a woman would be thrilled to hear about her breasts. Unfortunately, it just makes her sound uglier. Now we get an actual description, an adjective ('dun') that applies to her.In the first two lines, we hear only that the woman isn't like these other things (the sun, coral). Be sure to notice the little changes here.Instead, the speaker calls it 'dun,' a sort of grayish-brown color. This woman's skin isn't white, or even cream colored. A poet could praise a woman for having skin as white as snow. If the reddest red is like coral, then the whitest white is the color of snow.They get pretty much the same treatment as her lips.If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun Nope, says the speaker, that doesn't sound like my girlfriend's lips at all.Certain kinds of very red coral are polished and used to make jewelry so if you compared lips to coral, you'd be thinking of the most beautiful, shiny red thing you could imagine.If you imagined a stereotypically beautiful woman, like a model in a magazine, she'd probably have red lips, right?.Our speaker is refusing to fall back on clichés though, instead telling us that this simile doesn't apply at all.Ĭoral is far more red than her lips' red.It's like saying, 'her eyes are like sapphires.'

As we read the next few lines though, we see that the comparison is a standard way of praising a beautiful woman in a poem.

Well, so what? We wouldn't really expect them to be, would we?

The speaker jumps right into his anti-love poem, letting us know that this lady's eyes aren't like the sun.

In Shakespeare, though, it was more general, like 'my love' or 'my darling.'

Today, when we use the word 'mistress,' it's usually to refer to a woman who is dating a married man.

Here we are introduced for the first time to the main character in this poem, the speaker's 'mistress.'.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

Shakespeare sonnet 130