My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red ...
—And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
A century later another playwright, William Congreve, also used the image in a passage of scorn, after describing the physical allure of a great beauty:
But soon as e’er the beauteous idiot spoke,
Forth from her coral lips such folly broke
Like balm the trickling nonsense healed my wound,
And what her eyes enthralled, her tongue unbound.
How true love grows through a lifetime by tiny, unnoticed moments is beautifully pictured—to give an instance of a happier use of a coral image—by the nineteenth-century poet Coventry Patmore: