Sonnet 127

The Dark Lady: Desire

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

Notes

TLN 1766wordplay
“black beauty's successive heir, And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame”
'Successive heir' means a legitimate heir who inherits by lawful right of succession. The poet casts dark coloring as beauty's true inheritor, then pairs it with 'bastard shame': the conventional pale ideal is illegitimate, like a bastard child — born outside lawful right. 'Slander'd' means both dishonored and falsely defamed. The legal pair (heir versus bastard) frames the argument as one about legitimacy, not merely preference.
TLN 1769historical topical
“Fairing the foul with Art's false borrowed face”
Elizabethan cosmetics — chiefly ceruse (white-lead face paint) and vermilion for lips — let women artificially lighten their skin and add color. Shakespeare's verb 'fairing' (making fair) captures this: craft ('Art') creates a pale, rosy face that is 'false' because it counterfeits natural fairness, and 'borrowed' because the beauty belongs to someone else. The argument is that cosmetics have made natural and artificial beauty indistinguishable.
TLN 1770archaic vocab
“Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower, But is profan'd”
A 'bower' is a sheltered private space — a lady's inner chamber or a shaded garden retreat — and by extension a sanctuary. 'Profaned' (from Latin pro fanum, 'outside the temple') means treated as common or impure: something sacred has been desecrated. The poet says that genuine beauty has no name anyone will honor and no protected space left; it has been cast out of the sacred enclosure into the degraded world of cosmetic imitation.
TLN 1776wordplay
“they mourn becoming of their woe, That every tongue says beauty should look so”
'Becoming of their woe' is a compressed double meaning: (1) befitting, appropriate to their grief — they mourn in a graceful, fitting manner; and (2) graceful by means of their mourning — the act of grieving makes them beautiful. Both senses are active simultaneously. The couplet delivers the wry conclusion: those eyes mourn so becomingly that public opinion ('every tongue') has declared that beauty itself should look exactly as the mistress does — black-eyed.