Petrified Petrarch Essay -- Petrarchian Sonnet Essays

Petrified PetrarchTwo hundred age had passed between the sonnets of Petrarch and the reign of Queen Elizabeth. As a form and social system for poetic life, the sonnet had grown hard. Fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter remained fraught(p) with possibilities and vitality, but must the sense turn after the octave and fade out in the sestet? Love remained in some ways indefinable without this basic verse form, but something wasnt right. Too many uprise red lips and too much snow white skin be to unattainable turn inrs did not communicate the prevailing amorous imagination. The conventions were a petty too conventional. The metaphors were gone somewhat stale. The Reformation had intervened between the Italian reincarnation and her English counterpart. The Petrarchan sonnet was informed by a Catholic Christianity that love virginity. Thus it was the longing for the unattainable that raised the lover closer to God. The Elizabethan sonnet in many cases reflected the Protest ants high expression of married love, the consummation of which was the metaphor for the alliance between Christ and His Church. The beginnings of sonnets tended to free-base 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 puzzle and many of his sonnets are almost literal translations of the Italian. Wyatt felt no tariff to confine himself to the strict Italian form in ... ...e sestet gives the smell that the poet/lover adores her voice in spite of the fact that its slight pleasing than music, and that she surpasses any goddess or angel in her merely serviceman beauties and the approachability of h er common creature hood. The concluding couplet frees twentieth deoxycytidine monophosphate women from feeling they need to look like a Barbie doll. True partiality loves you the way you are. Knowing I too get bad jot and walk on solid ground, I am glad my preserve shares Shakespeares attitude.Works CitedJordan, Constance and Carroll, Clare editors. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., New York, 1999Maclean, Hugh and Prescott, Anne Lake editors. Edmund Spensers Poetry. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1968Wilson, bottom Dover. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, London, 1980