16th Century Poetry

The sonnet form

Sir Thomas Wyatt seemed to have introduced the sonnet form into England from Italy, where sonnetto meant " little song."

Form and rhetoric (principles for effective expression) of the sonnet had been popularized by the 14th-century Italian man of letters, Francesco Petrarch

Sonnets are 14 lines long and have a structured pattern of rhymes (rhyme scheme)

Wyatt borrowed some elements of the form from the Italian...

-used iambic pentameter rhythm for his sonnet lines, unlike the rhythm in Italian

Sonnets have various rhyme schemes

Italian sonnet is composed of...

-an octave (eight-line unit)
-a sestet (six-line unit) with the octave rhyming abba abba
-the sestet having a number of different possible rhyme schemes

Either Wyatt or Surrey (probably Surrey) introduced the English sonnet rhyme scheme

Poem is composed of three quatrains (four-line units) that rhyme abab cdcd efef

14 lines are completed with a couplet (two-line unit) that has a different rhyme, gg

English sonnet form was used by William Shakespeare and is sometimes called the Shakespearean sonnet

Variation on the English sonnet is named after its creator, Edmund Spenser

Spenserian sonnet has interlocking rhymes between quatrains

Rhyme scheme is abab bcbc cdcd ee

Is it|her na|ture or|is it|her will, A
To be so cruel to an humbled foe? B
If nature, then she may it mend with skill, A
If will, then she at will may will forgo. B
But if her nature and her will be so, B
that she will plague the man that loves her most: C
And take delight t'increase a wretch's woe, B
Then all her nature's goodly gifts are lost. C
And that same glorious beauty's idle boast, C
Is but a bait such wretches to beguile: D
As being long in her love's tempest tossed, C
She means at last to make her piteous spoil. D
Of fairest fair let never it be named, E
That so fair beauty was so foully shamed. E
Amoretti, Sonnet No. 41

Many rhyme schemes and meters were used for sonnets

People in England tended to call any short poem a sonnet

Sonnet structures have significant purposes

Usually an Italian sonnet will have a turn of thought or theme after the eight lines of the octave

Often the final couplet of an English or Spenserian sonnet sums up the theme of the poem somehow

Most sonnets also have a conceit...

-a basic metaphorical comparison that illuminates and complicates the sonnet's theme

Sonnets became a huge fashion in England, writers like Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare produced...

-sonnet cycles (sometimes called sonnet sequences)
-groups of sonnets, which seem to tell a story

Critics are not sure whether sonnet cycles are supposed to narrate a specific love story or just talk about various aspects of love

Some cycles have a few poems that tell a story for a while and then stop

Sonnets are lyric poetry that talks about the narrator's feelings at a specific point in time

Incorrect to think that they are completely biographical

Though they seem to be natural expressions of love, they are actually painstakingly designed to produce their effects

One of the ways they do this is through their rhetoric, or way of talking, about love

Petrarchan Rhetoric

Petrarchan rhetoric is named after Francesco Petrarch (1304−1374), who began to influence English poetry, at least indirectly, through writers like Geoffrey Chaucer

-Petrarch wrote a sequence of sonnets called the "Canzoniere" to a woman named Laura, whom he may never have met
-She may not even have existed

He had a way of writing to her and about her
−a mode of rhetoric

Expressed his desire for Laura using the language of philosophy (specifically Neoplatonism and Stoicism), of the Roman poet Ovid (who lived in the 1st century B.C.), and of Christianity.

Edmund Spenser's Sonnet 30 of "Amoretti" is a good example of the Petrarchan rhetoric

Spenser expresses his desire for his woman as a balanced antithesis or a paradox (e.g., "My love is like to ice, and I to fire")

Like Petrarch, Spenser admires this woman from afar and idealizes her, but he sees things from his point of view−through the lens of his own desire

Balance of opposites is presented as a picture of the poet's personality, as well as that of his beloved

Balance of opposites tends not to produce closure at the end of a Petrarchan poem

Here are the final lines of Spenser's Sonnet 30 of "Amoretti":

What more miraculous thing may be told
That fire which all thing melts, should harden ice:
And ice which is congealed with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.
(Spencer, 1575)

His beloved does not end up loving him

Petrarchan poems tend not to have a resolution, and, many times, Petrarchan sonnet cycles do not either.

Petrarchan poets also play on the religious overtones of their language

They make lyric poetry into a kind of confession

However, this wearing one's heart on one's sleeve has uses−not only in pursuing erotic desire, but other desires as well, such as securing more power at court or persuading the monarch to meet a request

Sonnet is a very effective form of poetry for pursuing these desires

It is compact and concise, much like the small rooms in which these poems used to be recited for friends and lovers at court

Sonnets can be precisely descriptive, but can also appeal to the expectations of either a small or a large audience

Scanning a Sonnet

Sonnets are highly structured, and every word means something

When analyzing a sonnet, a reader needs to take into account both content and form

First step in interpreting a sonnet is to try and figure out its subject

Sir Philip Sidney's Sonnet 1 from his sequence "Astrophil and Stella" is a good example

The sonnet starts....
"Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show/That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain..."
-goes on to spell out the poet's problems writing the poem for 12 more lines

He ends with "'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.'"

This poem seems to be about writer's block and how just writing what comes naturally from the heart is the best way to express oneself

But is something odd here? Can someone with writer's block really write 14 lines of great poetry about writer's block? What else is going on? The structure of the poem may say more

To scan the first line−"Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show"−first, divide the line into syllables and count them

As it happens, there are 12 syllables in this line

Twelve can be divided evenly into groups of two or three, so they rhythm is still not clear

If one chooses to divide the line into two-syllable units, one is playing the odds, since most poems in English are written with iambic rhythm

Dividing the poem into two-syllable units produces the following:

Lov ing| in truth,| and fain| in verse| my love| to show,

This division also makes clear a couple of accented syllables (in italics)−"Lov" and "show" (the last word)

Considering the rule that small connector words (like "in," "and," "my," and "to") are usually unaccented, one can come up with the following scan of accented syllables, shown here in italics:

Lov ing| in truth,| and fain| in verse| my love| to show

At this point, the line can be described as primarily iambic (with a trochaic foot at the beginning) hexameter (a six-foot iambic line)

But this line is longer than the normal pentameter (five-foot) sonnet line and there is more

If one reads this poem aloud, one cannot tell whether the fifth word is "fain" (wishing) or "feign" (dishonestly pretending)

So, in one line we have "truth" and "feign," truth and dishonesty. Is the poet playing around here?

Looking through the rest of the poem's structure, one can notice a number of other things

Many of the lines begin with trochaic feet; line nine, which describes the crippled way his words come out, and sounds as if the line is stumbling

Poem is structured so that it mirrors what it describes

Long lines and the irregular rhythms mean something

Style creates a very fluent, well-designed poem describing, in structure as well as words, not being able to write a poem

Although Sidney is certainly a great poet, in his role as the narrator, Astrophil, he is not

Upcoming...

• William Shakespeare, “Sonnets” 18, 29, 30, 55, 60, 73, 87, 116, 130, 138, 144 CPA Topic 4 Part 3-Shakespeare's Sonnets
• CPA Topic 4 Part 3-Shakespeare's Sonnets

References

Harmon, W., & Holman, H. (2006) A handbook to literature. (10th ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.


Spencer, E. (1595). Amoretti. Retrieved from http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/spenser1.html