Notice the subtle rhyme between disgusted and discussed it

This part of the verse is similar to J. Cole’s ‘Lights Please’, but that may just be a coincidence.

He’s Talking about Erykah Badu when he talking about his baby momma and when he said he talked to this girl who said lay down and rest your weary head

what he saying he learning to relax and gather his self and now that he’s older he has a real WOMAN by his side to comfort him with problems and to motivate him also

Don’t think it can be God as the next few lines lead us to believe he has sex with the girl.

I think it’s probably just showing how the cycle repeats. He has this huge revelation about commitment and shit, which upsets him. Upset, he then turns to this comforting female. He admits it’s a distraction but keeps going and they end up having sex and he appears happy again, but he’ll likely end up thinking again like the beginning of the verse.

Finally comes the beautiful realization of his feelings for his mistress. Despite the rough and judgemental comparisons, he finds that his love is one that could only be found in a million as it was so rare. The weight that society’s standards on beauty and women come at many with false statements that are pushed to be true and, yet at the end of the day, are false. It goes to show that these standards no matter how evident do not affect the way that one person loves another.

I’d be really grateful if the commentator who wrote about meta-textuality could clarify. I define that as more or less the same as inter-textuality, that is linking texts, not as stated here the ‘turn’ that cancels everything before. I might be wrong.

Marvellous annotations all through, by the way.

I can’t possibly improve on the first interpretation offered here. The second strikes me as a stretch. Just what parsing of the last two lines could yield this interpretation? If “belied” is not a participle modifying"she" (i.e. any woman) than it must be a verb, the subject of which has to be “she” (the speaker’s mistress). That would yield" “Than anyone my mistress gave the lie to via false comparisons.” That doesn’t seem to make much sense. What am I missing?

Shakespeare’s best sonnets make fun of the sappy, annoying love poetry stereotypes. Whereas other poets would go on for lines and lines about how supremely beautiful a woman was, Shakespeare is employing a different, more honest method. In this poem, rather than make obviously impossible comparisons, Shakespeare’s speaker simply declares how deep his love is for her, which should be more than enough.

It’s interesting to see that from the very beginning we get to witness a blow by blow on what his mistress looks like. It’s as if we were to witness some incredibly beautiful goddess when, in point, it turns out to be the exact opposite. The details that are described are nothing to be applauded and as mentioned before were considered signs of someone from a lower status judged by society in that time period. It almost makes the reader lean towards expecting something a totally different outcome for the end.

This is awesome, but can we get some citation up in here?