Her Hair

Another major cliché about women's beauty is that their hair should be silky smooth and shiny. Shakespeare turn this assumption on its head in a big way in this poem. Readers in Shakespeare's time would have recognized all these worn-out comparisons as allusions to images in other love poems. Famous examples of traditional love sonnets include the poems of Petrarch, an Italian poet from the 14th century.

• Line 4: We think this image of hair as black wires sprouting out of her head is meant to gross you out a little bit. Sounds like a creepy doll, like Shakespeare meets the Bride of Chucky.