Introduction The literary value of William Shakespeare’s sonnets can be discussed in a variety of contexts. For some, the sonnets are associated with cultural ciphers that only sophisticated people at dinner parties understand. For others, Shakespeare’s sonnets are literary works that “everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read” (Paterson). To introduce the analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” it is important to mention a brief history of sonnets themselves. Shakespeare wrote a total of 154 poems that were first published in 1609. The sonnets are completely different from his plays, although they also contain elements of dramaturgy as well as the general sense of storytelling. Every poem has a specific topic that can be discussed either separately or in the context of other poems. Unfortunately, too little is known about Shakespeare’s life to say for sure whether his sonnets were autobiographical in meaning; therefore, readers usually perceive them as written by a “speaker.” Despite the fact that the usual approach to analyzing poems and sonnets is to divide literary devices and assess their value, it is proposed to use the structuralist approach and analyze Sonnet 130 as a system of artifacts and signs that bear a specific meaning when combined. Structuralist Approach While Shakespeare’s sonnets can be analyzed through different approaches, this analysis will use the structuralist approach to assess the attitudes of the speaker towards his beloved woman in Sonnet 130. In linguistics, structuralism is an approach that studies relationships between signs and systems instead of analyzing them in isolation or “a mode of analysis of cultural artifacts which originates in the methods of contemporary linguistics” (Culler 4). Therefore, structuralism can be regarded as an approach that is based on the supposition that if actions of human beings have a specific meaning, there should be a system of conventions that enables the existence of that meaning. For example, when confronted by the ceremony of baptism, an observer from a culture where baptism does not exist may not regard it as a cultural phenomenon. Procedures and actions that take place during baptism are only understandable to the representatives of the culture in which the tradition is considered common. If to explain how the structuralist approach will be applied in the context of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, the whole meaning of the poetic piece will be assessed by combining the value of each verse. Within such an interpretation of the Sonnet, exploring artifacts (verses) with meaning and not physical phenomena will allow the analyst to make distinguishments between them while enabling to bear meaning within “the symbolic system from which they derive” (Culler 6). Each artifact (verse) will be considered as a structure in itself that is defined with the help of the place they hold within the unified structure. It is important to mention that the grammatic structure of the Sonnet will play no part in the structuralist analysis since it did not have any connections to the development of structuralism itself. If to mention Chomsky’s approach towards structuralism in