Anyone who has been fooled by a filter, a retouched photograph or a very good foundation will recognise the small shock at the heart of "Sham." A speaker gazes at a woman and sees perfection, then looks a second time and sees paint. The poem is built on that double take, and its whole drama is the distance between the first look and the second.
The opening stanza is pure adoration. The woman's eyes are "the heaven of blue," her cheeks lit with "rosy hue," and the speaker even reads a feeling into her face: "The enraptured glow— / Or so it seemed— / Of her first love." That parenthetical hesitation, "Or so it seemed," is easy to skim past, yet it quietly poisons the whole passage. Before the speaker has noticed anything wrong, he has already admitted that he is interpreting rather than seeing. The language of heaven, blushes and first love is the language of romance, and the poem lets it run just long enough to build a pedestal before removing it.
The pivot comes with "Alas!" The second stanza repeats the opening gesture ("I looked into those placid eyes") but the adjectives have cooled. "Placid" is a telling word: calm, yes, but also unmoving, even lifeless. The "faultless face" is now a suspicious compliment, because real faces are rarely faultless. What holds the speaker's gaze is "the stare / That set me wondering," a fixed, mask-like look. The stanza ends on a question rather than an answer, and the question mark does the work of a raised eyebrow.
The third stanza delivers the verdict, and its vocabulary changes completely. Gone are the heavens and roses; in come "Lashes, long and separated," "Penciled brows," and "lids all painted." These are the terms of a cosmetic inventory, cold and exact, as though the speaker has become a forensic examiner. Even the pale cheeks are "done" in "delicate tints," a verb that treats her face like a finished job, a surface worked on by someone's hand. The pinkness that once suggested the blush of first love has been reclassified as a product.
The structure supports this collapse. The lines are short and uneven, with no regular metre and no consistent rhyme scheme, though small echoes appear: "hue" and "blue" link the dreamy opening, while "stare" answers "there" in the middle stanza. The poem's real formal trick is its final line. Everything leads to "In Counterfeit!", set apart and capitalised, with the exclamation mark landing like a gavel. The stray line "The connoisseur" is a nice touch too: a connoisseur is someone with a refined eye for the genuine, so the poem suggests that the only person who could appreciate this face is an expert in fakes. The speaker, who began as a worshipper, ends as an unimpressed critic.
The title does its own quiet work. A "sham" is not merely a falsehood but a deliberate pretence, something presented as real. That word shifts blame in an interesting way. Is the woman the deceiver, or are the speaker's own romantic expectations the real counterfeit? "Or so it seemed" hints at the latter: he was halfway to fooling himself before the paint ever caught his eye. The poem never decides, and that ambiguity keeps it from being a simple sneer at make-up.
What makes "Sham" worth reading is how efficiently it dramatises a universal habit of mind: we project meaning onto surfaces, then feel betrayed when the surface turns out to be constructed. In under thirty lines it moves from rapture to suspicion to disdain, using nothing more than a change of vocabulary and a well-timed punchline. Whether you read it as a critique of artifice, of vanity, or of the speaker's own gullibility, it leaves you looking a little more carefully at faces, including the one in the mirror.