Sonnet 20: A Woman’s Face with Nature’s Own Hand Painted

Sonnet 20 is the sequence’s most formally daring poem — and the one that addresses, with more directness than anywhere else, exactly what kind of love this is.

Sonnet 20 (Full Poem)

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

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At a Glance

Here are the key facts about Sonnet 20 for quick reference.

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Why It Still Matters

After seventeen sonnets of argument about beauty and time, and then Sonnet 18’s triumphant claim for poetry, Sonnet 20 does something none of the preceding poems has done: it addresses the nature of the speaker’s feeling for the youth directly. Not what should be done with beauty, not what time will do to it, not what poetry can preserve — but what this love actually is and what it can and cannot contain.

The poem is playful in manner and serious in purpose. The myth of Nature falling in love with her own creation and adding a male sex to what was designed as female is presented with comic lightness — but the conclusion the myth generates is not comic at all. The speaker’s desire is acknowledged (“defeated,” “my purpose”), renounced (“mine be thy love”), and then reframed as something superior to what was renounced. The physical is given to women as their “treasure.” The love — the non-physical, the emotional, the imaginative — is claimed by the speaker.

Whether that reframing is genuine contentment or elaborate consolation is the question the poem declines to answer. That ambiguity is what keeps it alive.

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Key Themes

Sonnet 20 organises itself around three ideas, each one more complex on close reading than it first appears.

Androgyny as Ideal Beauty. The poem opens by attributing to the youth the best qualities associated with both sexes: a woman’s face, but painted by nature rather than cosmetics; a woman’s gentle heart, but without the inconstancy supposedly characteristic of women; a man’s bearing and colouring. The portrait is not a simple blend but a selective synthesis — the youth inherits the appealing qualities of both while being exempt from the faults of either. “Master-mistress of my passion” is the sequence’s most compressed statement of this synthesis: the youth commands the speaker’s feeling (master) while also embodying the gender that conventionally inspires it (mistress). The phrase does not resolve into either term; it holds both.

Nature as Creator and Comic Antagonist. The third quatrain introduces a myth: nature, creating what was intended as a woman, became so enamoured of her own creation that she added a male sex at the last moment, thereby defeating the speaker’s romantic purposes. The myth is comic — Nature as a besotted artist making a last-minute alteration — but its consequences are serious. The speaker is “defeated” by an addition that is “to my purpose nothing.” The phrase is deliberately ambiguous: the addition serves no purpose for the speaker, and it is, as a thing, nothing to the speaker’s interest. The pun on “nothing” — Elizabethan slang for the female genitalia, and therefore the opposite of what was added — is one of the poem’s many sexual wordplays, and it operates simultaneously with the serious meaning.

Love Distinguished from Use. The couplet draws the poem’s central distinction. “Mine be thy love” — the speaker claims the emotional bond, the inner feeling, the quality of the youth’s regard. “Thy love’s use their treasure” — the physical expression of that love, its sexual “use,” is given to women. The word “use” does double duty: it means both the utilisation of something and, in financial terms, the interest on a principal — the return generated by a capital sum. The youth’s love is the principal; its use, its physical expression, is the interest that women receive. The speaker retains the principal. Whether this is genuine consolation or elaborate rationalisation is left deliberately open.

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Key Literary Devices

The poem’s most important device is one that is almost never discussed in analyses of its content: the rhyme scheme.

Feminine Rhyme Throughout. Every single rhyme in Sonnet 20 is a feminine rhyme — a rhyme in which the final syllable is unstressed, giving each line an extra beat: painted / acquainted, passion / fashion, rolling / controlling, gazeth / amazeth, created / doted, a-doting / nothing, pleasure / treasure. This is unique in Shakespeare’s sequence. No other sonnet sustains feminine rhyme across all fourteen lines. The formal choice is not decorative — it enacts the poem’s subject. Feminine rhyme is softer, more open-ended, less emphatic than masculine rhyme. A poem about gender’s instability and the blending of qualities associated with different sexes uses a rhyme scheme that formally inhabits the space between the emphatic and the yielding. The form is the argument.

“Master-Mistress.” The poem’s most discussed phrase and its most productive paradox. A master is a man of authority; a mistress is a woman who inspires love. The compound collapses the distinction between the one who commands and the one who is desired, between the powerful and the beloved. It also collapses the speaker’s relationship to the youth into a single word: neither purely one thing nor the other, holding both positions simultaneously.

The Nature Myth. Nature as a character who falls in love with her own creation is a comic device that allows Shakespeare to treat the youth’s male sex as an accident of the creative process rather than a fixed ontological fact. The youth was “first created” as a woman; the male addition was Nature’s caprice. This framing does not deny the youth’s sex but it does denaturalise it — it makes masculinity a late addition rather than an essential quality. The myth also allows Shakespeare to position himself as the victim of Nature’s caprice rather than of his own desire, which is a wry and slightly self-deprecating move.

The Sexual Wordplay. The final quatrain and couplet are saturated with Elizabethan sexual puns. “Pricked thee out” means both “selected you” and, literally, equipped you with a phallus. “One thing” refers to the male organ. “Nothing” carries the slang meaning of the female genitalia. “Use” carries the sense of sexual intercourse alongside its financial sense. Shakespeare has not hidden this wordplay; he has layered it over the poem’s surface meaning so that both registers operate simultaneously. The effect is not crude — the puns are deployed in service of the poem’s serious distinction between love and use — but they are absolutely intentional, and reading the couplet without them is reading only half the poem.

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Stanza by Stanza

Lines 1–4. The poem opens with a portrait that is immediately unusual: the youth has a woman’s face, but it is nature’s own work rather than the artificial face produced by cosmetics. “Nature’s own hand painted” contrasts with the painted faces of fashionable women, which were a common target of Elizabethan satire. The youth is naturally what women achieve artificially. “Master-mistress of my passion” — the second line delivers the poem’s central paradox in compressed form. A woman’s gentle heart follows, and then the qualification that separates the youth from women: he has the heart without the inconstancy. “As is false women’s fashion” — the line is stereotyping women as inherently changeable, which is a conventional Elizabethan position rather than Shakespeare’s considered view, but it does the argumentative work of distinguishing the youth from the gender whose face he wears.

Lines 5–8. The second quatrain focuses on the youth’s eyes and bearing. “An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling” — “rolling” eyes were associated with flirtation and inconstancy; the youth’s eyes are less given to this, suggesting greater integrity of gaze. “Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth” — whatever the youth looks at is enriched by the looking. This is a reversal of the conventional power structure: the gaze does not consume but gives. “A man in hue, all hues in his controlling” — the youth is male in complexion (hue) but commands all colours and qualities, all aspects of human beauty, both male and female. “Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth” — the youth’s beauty operates across gender lines, stealing the visual attention of men and the deeper amazement of women. The distinction is interesting: men are captured visually, women more profoundly affected.

Lines 9–12. The third quatrain introduces the myth. “And for a woman wert thou first created” — the youth’s original design was female. “Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting” — while making the youth, Nature fell in love with her own creation. The image of Nature as a besotted artist is comic but also carries weight: even the creator of all things was not immune to the youth’s appeal. “And by addition me of thee defeated” — the addition — the male sex — defeats the speaker. The word “defeated” is honest and slightly rueful: not merely disappointed but actively overcome, set back, thwarted. “By adding one thing to my purpose nothing” — the addition serves no purpose for the speaker, and is, as a thing, nothing to his interest. The double meaning of “nothing” (the female organ, and therefore the thing that was not added) operates beneath the surface.

Lines 13–14. The couplet makes the poem’s central distinction in its most explicit and most punning form. “But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure” — selected you (with the inevitable pun on the physical meaning of pricked) for the pleasure of women. “Mine be thy love” — the speaker claims love: the emotional, the non-physical, the inner quality of the youth’s feeling toward him. “And thy love’s use their treasure” — women receive the use of that love, its physical and sexual expression. Use is both practical (the utilisation of something) and financial (the interest generated by a capital sum) and sexual. The speaker retains the principal — the love itself — while the interest — its physical expression — goes elsewhere. Whether this arrangement is a genuine peace or a consolation constructed from necessity is the question the couplet answers in two directions at once.

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Analysis

Sonnet 20 is doing several things simultaneously, and most readings of it choose one and ignore the others. It is a comic poem about Nature’s creative caprice. It is a serious meditation on the nature of desire and its relationship to love. It is a formal experiment in which the rhyme scheme enacts the poem’s argument. And it is the sequence’s most direct acknowledgment that the speaker’s feeling for the youth is not straightforwardly platonic — desire is present, named, and then renounced in favour of something the speaker claims is superior.

The renunciation in the couplet is the poem’s most debated moment. “Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure” — is this genuine contentment or elaborate consolation? The financial metaphor — love as principal, use as interest — is elegant but it is also a way of making the best of a situation. One can read the couplet as the speaker successfully distinguishing between kinds of love and claiming the better kind. One can also read it as the speaker making philosophical virtue of an unavoidable necessity. The poem does not force a choice between these readings, and that refusal is part of its intelligence.

The feminine rhyme scheme is the poem’s most underappreciated feature. In a sequence where every other sonnet rhymes on stressed final syllables — hard, emphatic, definitive — Sonnet 20’s uniform feminine rhymes create a softer, more tentative music. The rhymes do not arrive with the same finality. They leave a syllable trailing after the rhyme sound, a small extension that never quite settles. This is appropriate for a poem about categories that do not settle: the youth is neither purely male nor purely female, neither purely the speaker’s beloved nor purely unavailable, and the speaker’s love is neither purely platonic nor purely something else. The form refuses the definitiveness that masculine rhyme would provide, holding the poem in the productive instability that is its subject.

The sexual wordplay in the final quatrain is sometimes treated as an embarrassment — evidence that the poem cannot be about what it seems to be about, or that Shakespeare was merely joking. But the puns are not incidental decoration. They are how Shakespeare addresses the body’s claims while simultaneously displacing them. By acknowledging through wordplay what he is declining to claim directly, the speaker simultaneously admits and transcends the sexual dimension of his feeling. The wordplay is the honesty, held at one remove.

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Related Sonnets

Three sonnets speak directly to the concerns of Sonnet 20.

Sonnet 18: The immediate predecessor in the sequence’s dominant argument — poetry as the vehicle of immortality, the beloved as the proof. Sonnet 20 turns away from that argument entirely to address something more personal and more uncomfortable: what the speaker actually feels, and what he can and cannot have. The contrast between the two poems shows the range of what the Fair Youth sequence contains.

Sonnet 53: Another meditation on the youth’s androgynous beauty — “What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?” — which approaches the same multiplicity of the youth’s appeal from a different and more mythological angle. Where Sonnet 20 uses comic myth, Sonnet 53 uses classical allusion. Both are trying to account for a beauty that seems to contain all beauty.

Sonnet 144: The poem that most directly addresses the speaker’s two loves — the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady — and the tension between them. Where Sonnet 20 draws the distinction between the love claimed for the youth and the use given to women, Sonnet 144 shows what happens when those two categories become entangled. Reading the two together reveals the emotional architecture that Sonnet 20 puts in place and Sonnet 144 tests to breaking point.

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