In the first sonnet on the Dark Lady, "Sonnet 127," the speaker immediately launches into his complaint about sonnet conventions or, to be more exact, about attitudes regarding a standard of beauty. During the Renaissance, as noted several times previously, beauty in women was connected to having fair features: light skin, blue eyes, blond hair. Like the poets of earlier sonnet cycles, Shakespeare's purpose in this poem is to praise the beauty of the lady he adores. However, his lady is dark. She has dark skin, black eyes, and black hair. Shakespeare's argument, though, is that her beauty surpasses the beauty of all other women, including the fair ones.
In regards to the structure, this sonnet has two parts: an octet (the first eight lines) and a sestet. In the octet, the speaker makes some general comments about beauty and coloring. In the sestet, he makes specific comments about the Dark Lady herself.
In the first quatrain (the first four lines), the speaker states that most poets or people did not consider dark features ("black") to be beautiful ("fair") in "the old age." Here "the old age" does not refer to a time very long ago, for we know that the convention in placing value on light or fair features is a feature of the Renaissance. So "old age" here actually refers to the time, to the very moment, before the Dark Lady came into the speaker's life. In the second line of the quatrain, the speaker adds that