My mistress' eyes

I'll admit- when I read this I thought "wow, the speaker in this poem is a jerk." I took the poem and a sort of laundry list pointing out all the negative aspects of the speakers mistress. However, after we discussed the poem in our large group I really started to like it. A lot of the time I don't enjoy poetry. Half of the time I feel like what I am reading makes no sense. I feel like the poet just wrote a bunch of different words that sounded really fancy or cool together but didn't have a real meaning to them. I hate reading lines of poetry where the speaker just goes on and on about how beautiful a woman is by comparing her to unrealistic things. The fact that Shakespeare satirizes this concept is awesome. On the other hand, I feel like there had to be a better way to do so than to make this woman sound ugly. Basically the whole poem felt like one of those statements people make when asked "is she pretty?" - if this person is clearly not cut out for Miss America the typical answer is something along the lines of "well, she has a great personality". Even though I don't think that is quite what Shakespeare was going for, it's hard to get little else from the poem. The first 12 out of 14 lines basically explains everything this girl is not. Oh but then he throws in two lines about how shes rare and there's no one who can compare and that is supposed to make up for it? I love the idea of the poem, but I don't really like how Shakespeare did it. But it's Shakespeare....so 400 and some years late my opinion really doesn't really matter. obviously if we are still reading this poem it must be pretty dang good.