Sonnet 127, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature's power,
Fairing the foul with Art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem:
     Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
     That every tongue says beauty should look so.

Sonnet 127, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

In a year where racism is very much alive, I wonder how a contemporary audience might respond to this sonnet.  Shakespeare is as much a product of his era and geography, as any artist inevitably is.  In `A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, he has the two battling young ladies insult each other repeatedly, one calling the other Ethiope.  So, yes, as he meditates in this sonnet, black is not commonly associated with beauty.  In fact, black is slandered, and profaned, and disgraced.  But the speaker's lover is Black, and it shakes his shibboleths.

This is a complex subject, and the structure of the sonnet is altered by the need for two voltas, the first to start the third quatrain: Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black...  Whether purely by reasoning or with some admixture of observation, the speaker comes around to see that black is beautiful.  People who are fair complexioned seem to mourn their lack of beauty and their need to create false esteem to make themselves beautiful.  Reference, for instance, White Americans' obsession with tanning.  The second volta cinches the turnaround in the speaker's notions of beauty.

A powerful sonnet, a powerful recitation by Isaiah Johnson.