Activity Sheet 3: Blazons

A blazon is a poem in which the speaker catalogues each part of a woman’s body. These body

parts are typically compared to aspects of the natural world: teeth are compared to pearls,

lips to coral, hair to gold, etc. This literary trend originated with the influential fourteenth-

century Italian poet, Petrarch, but later spread across Europe, becoming a hugely popular way

of writing poetry in the Renaissance.

Read the following sonnets by the English poets Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) and William

Shakespeare (1564-1616), as well as the illustration from The Extravagant Shepherd (1654)

that follows. Then consider the questions in the boxes. As on the previous activity sheet, I

have provided more context and information on the final page. You may wish to return to the

questions after reading this section, considering how it might reshape your answers.

Edmund Spenser, ‘Sonnet 15’

Ye tradeful* merchants that, with weary toil, (*engaged in trade)

Do seek most precious things to make your gain

And both the Indias of their treasures spoil,

What needeth you to seek so far in vain?

For lo, my love doth in herself contain

All this world’s riches that may far be found:

If sapphires, lo, her eyes be sapphires plain;

If rubies, lo, her lips be rubies sound;

If pearls, her teeth be pearls both pure and round;

If ivory, her forehead ivory ween*; (*think, suppose)

If gold, her locks are finest gold on ground;

If silver, her fair hands are silver sheen.

But that which fairest is, but few behold:

Her mind, adorned with virtues manifold.

William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 130’

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun*; *dark, dull

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd*, red and white, *pink

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks*. *emits vapour

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she* belied** with false compare. *woman **misrepresented

Why do you think the poem is addressed to ‘tradeful merchants’?

How would you describe the poem’s tone?

What kinds of objects are the woman’s body parts compared to? Why is this significant?

What is the effect of describing each of the woman’s body parts in turn? Do you find it complimentary, or disconcerting?

How should we read the poem’s final line? Do you think the poet is being sincere?

Having studied the previous activity sheet, what connections can you identify between Renaissance anatomy and the blazon?

Would you describe this poem as a blazon? What do you think the poet is trying to say about the blazon form?

Who do you think the speaker is addressing in this poem?

There is a lot of negation in this poem: ‘nothing’, ‘no such roses’, ‘I never saw a goddess go’. Why is this significant?

The final words of the poem are ‘false compare’. Is there is something inherently troubling about comparing someone you love to something else? If so, why?

Both of these sonnets end with a rhyming couplet. How does this affect our experience of reading the poems?

Ph

oto

cre

dit

: H

ou

ghto

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ibra

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Har

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Blazoning the body

Blazons were typically written in highly competitive court cultures, where men vied with each

other for status and privileges. As we can see in Spenser’s sonnet, by comparing the woman’s

body parts to expensive objects, the speaker transforms her into a piece of valuable property

to be exhibited to his male competitors. The highly commercial language of ‘Sonnet 15’ makes

this objectifying process particularly obvious: Spenser transforms his beloved woman’s body

into a source of ‘[a]ll this world’s riches’, boasting that he already possesses the valuable

goods that ‘tradeful merchants’ laboriously seek.

The Renaissance period was deeply patriarchal (male-dominated). Although the woman being

blazoned in Spenser’s poem is presented as the love-interest of the speaker, it is not clear

that his relationship with her is the focus of the poem. While the poem is superficially ‘about’

the woman, it is really concerned with relationships between men: the woman and her body

are only incidental in this exchange, becoming a kind of currency to be traded rather than

important in their own right. At the same time, the poem itself becomes a means of exhibiting

poetic skill and ingenuity: ‘[t]he 'blazon' ... allowed men to vie with one another in the

production of art. Female body parts - eyes, eyebrows, breasts - could be bandied about in

poetic blasons and contreblasons.’1 Precisely because the blazon was such a conventional way

of writing poetry by the late sixteenth century, it was a powerful sphere in which to

demonstrate one’s capacity for wit and originality.

Many literary critics have also emphasised the fact that the blazon partitions the female body.

The woman is no longer represented as a person in her own right; instead she becomes a

1 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 192.

Consider the illustration above, from The Extravagant Shepherd (1654), an English

translation of a French book by Charles Sorel.

What can you see in the woman’s body? What do you think the artist is trying to say about

the blazon? How might you link this to Shakespeare’s sonnet?

collection of beautiful objects to be catalogued and enjoyed by the male speaker and his

(typically male) readers. Moreover, critics have connected the blazon with the new, empirical

methods of anatomical investigation. Both blazons and anatomy divide up the body in order

to make sense of it, and both have been seen as attempts to exert control over something

that is potentially confusing and unintelligible. David Norbrook, for example, writes that ‘the

vogue in the sixteenth century for the blazon, the detailed enumeration of the parts of the

woman's body, can be seen as reflecting the new scientific mentality with its mastering gaze,

its passion for mapping the world in order to gain power over it.’2 As Norbrook suggests, many

critics have also connected poetic blazons and anatomy with developments in cartography

(map-making). In poetry, women’s bodies are often imagined as physical territories that need

to be colonized, charted, and divided up—much like the recently discovered ‘New World’. We

can see the presence of global trade and exploration in Spenser’s poem, in which the speaker

claims to already possess the ‘precious things’ that European merchants voyaged across the

world to find.

2 David Norbrook, ‘Introduction’ in The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, ed. by H. R. Woudhuysen (London:

Penguin, 1992), p. 43.