Petrified Petrarch

Petrified Petrarch

Two hundred years had passed between the sonnets of Petrarch and the reign of Queen Elizabeth. As a form and structure for poetic life, the sonnet had grown hard. Fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter remained pregnant with possibilities and vitality, but must the sense turn after the octave and resolve in the sestet? Love remained in some ways inexpressible without this basic verse form, but something wasn’t right. Too many rose red lips and too much snow white skin belonging to unattainable lovers did not communicate the prevailing amorous imagination. The conventions were a little too conventional. The metaphors were gone somewhat stale.

The Reformation had intervened between the Italian Renaissance and her English counterpart. The Petrarchan sonnet was informed by a Catholic Christianity that adored virginity. Thus it was the longing for the unattainable that raised the lover closer to God. The Elizabethan sonnet in many cases reflected the Protestant’s high view of married love, the consummation of which was the metaphor for the relationship between Christ and His Church. The beginnings of sonnets tended to establish a place for the poem within the Petrarchan tradition, and the endings to emphasize their divergence from that tradition. In this way then the beginnings and endings of sonnets works to define the Love/hate relationship of the Elizabethan poet with Petrarch.

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), a contemporary of Martin Luther and Henry VIII, first introduced Petrarchan love poetry into England. He was a frequent imitator of the foreign model and many of his sonnets are almost literal translations of the Italian. Wyatt felt no obligation to confine himself to the strict Italian form in ...

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...e sestet gives the impression that the poet/lover adores her voice in spite of the fact that it’s less pleasing than music, and that she surpasses any goddess or angel in her merely human beauties and the approachability of her common creature hood. The concluding couplet frees twentieth century women from feeling they need to look like a Barbie doll. True affection loves you the way you are. Knowing I too get bad breath and walk on solid ground, I am glad my husband shares Shakespeare’s attitude.

Works Cited

Jordan, Constance and Carroll, Clare editors. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., New York, 1999

Maclean, Hugh and Prescott, Anne Lake editors. Edmund Spenser’s Poetry. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1968

Wilson, John Dover. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, London, 1980