My Mistress' Eye

The tone in this poem is one mostly of satire. For the speaker satirizes all the poets of the past comparing their lovers to very impossibly beautiful things from nature. Therefore the speaker compares his own lover to realistic objects or comes off as denouncing the woman's physical attributes. Yet that is not the speakers point for he calls his love "as rare" which means that he does love his mistress and that she is beautiful. But she is not as beautiful as the things the poets of old compared their ladies too. The tone of satire comes from when the speaker says that his mistress' attributes are not like, for example, the sun. It makes the satire clear.