Cynthia Gaw

English 331/ Marx

Paper Option #11

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 order to express his Protestant ideas about love. He frequently eliminated the volte (turning point after the octet) and varied the rhyme scheme. One reads in Wyatt’s sonnets about some justice in love; there is more than unrequited love and enduring adoration and misery. His male lover expresses a desire to break out of his amorous prison. This is an anti-Petrarchan theme. This is the opposite of the hopelessly adoring pose of the enslaved Petrarchan lover.

The opening sonnet in Astrophel and Stella begins Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,/ That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain- (Longman 987). Sidney begins in imitation of Petrarch in three ways. The poet’s beloved is unkind; so he is plunged into despair. Sidney has also adopted Petrarch’s habit of self-scrutiny. Thirdly the thought changes at the end of the eighth line. The octave tells of the poet’s futile efforts to write a poem; the sestet discloses why he had been unsuccessful. The poet looks to the Petrarchan tradition for inspiration to cure his writer’s block. Oft turning other’s leaves, to see if thence would flow/ Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain (7-8). But this method is unproductive because it lacks the support of imagination. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay (9).

Sidney is employing the new English sonnet form developed by Surrey. This new structural scheme divides the poem into three quatrains and a concluding couplet. The rhyme, abab cdcd efef gg, is easier and more obvious to the ear. This structure is more progressive and climatic and it ends with a bang on an epigrammatic couplet. Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite;/ "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write." Sidney will take what he can from Petrarch; but he will write from individual inspiration provided by his muse within. This muse for Sidney was a very Protestant indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Sonnet 71 of Astrophil and Stella begins with a very Petrarchan description in superlatives. Who will in fairest book of Nature know,/ How Virtue may best lodged in beauty be,/ Let him but learn of Love to read in thee,/ Stella, those fair lines, which true goodness show (Longman 989). These lines also reveal however a very Protestant view of the world. Nature is a valid revelation of God to man. As a supplement to the Bible it reveals the character of the creator. Because of the priesthood of all believers individuals could read the Divine in Nature through reason and grace. In the same way Durer traces the lines of beauty of an owl on a woodcut for spiritual understanding and moral improvement, so Sidney traces the lines of Stella’s beauty to discover Virtue.

Sidney ends the sonnet speaking directly to Stella:

And not content to be Perfection’s heir

Thyself, doest strive all minds that way to move:

Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair.

So while thy beauty draws the heart to love,

As fast thy virtue bends that love to good:

But ah, Desire still cries, give me some food.

In spite of much Petrarchan language, these lines mock the courtly lover’s platonic relationship. This is a repudiation of idealistic Italian asceticism. Desire is unapologetic sexual longing, and food is natural sexual gratification. Stella and Laura both serve as models and incentives of righteousness. But Laura is an upper-story symbol, while Stella is a very warm-blooded woman. Laura could have been the model for a Catholic painting of the Virgin by Giotto; But Stella is a would-be Danae by Rembrandt- a Protestant wife waiting in bed. Speaking of Edmund Spenser’s choice to end his great sonnet sequence the Amoretti with the marriage ode Epithalamion, Maclean and Prescott write: "Spenser thus applies Reformation thought on sex and marriage to Petrarchan tradition, for Protestants tended to elevate married sexuality above celibacy. It is appropriate therefore, that Spenser concludes his sonnet sequence not with longer poetic complaint (as had, for example, Daniel and Lodge), but with a nuptial song (Maclean and Prescott 638)."

The last sonnet (110) from Astrophel and Stella leaves the poet unfulfilled in his earthly love affair. Lady Rich is married. This however does not sink him deep into despair, but actually elevates him into a higher spiritual relationship which alone can truly fulfill. This is remindful of the of the Petrarchan beloved whose heavenly perfection draws the lover upward on the neo-platonic ladder, always closer to heaven. The poet/lover is a man who seeketh heaven, and comes of heavenly breath. For Petrarch Laura inspires this because she is a God; but for Sidney there is no God but God. Idolatry does not promote relationship with the God of the Reformation. The poem concludes with the poet aspiring to higher things eternal pleasures and freedoms of which relationship with Stella was only a temporal hint. He ends with dependence on Divine inspiration, heavenly breath, which enables him to see the world for what is really is and fills him with eternal love. Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see;/ Eternal love, maintain thy life in me. Sidney has achieved a blending of the classical, with Protestant Christian doctrine and a vital new psychological realism. He has created a lyrical fiction that provides us with a valid hypothesis about love’s influence on the mind.

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 goes far beyond divergence from Petrarch to creating a direct satire on the Petrarchan sonnet. Without criticizing other poets, Shakespeare satirizes the whole tradition of comparing the beloved to all the perfections of nature to the point of creating an inhuman idol or goddess. The first line states My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun (Wilson 1143). This is the first of many negative comparisons between the beloved and the Petrarchan ideal in the octet. These serve not to insult her, but to emphasize that she is a real flesh-and-blood human being bearing an individual identity. The 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