English 1022E Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Sonnet 18, Petrarchan Sonnet, Rhyme Scheme
12 Jan 2017
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English 1022: Week 9
Lyric Poetry
Petrarchan/Italian
Shakespearean/English
• Expresses a single idea, single mood and creates a strong effect
• One of the most common, complex and fascinating forms is the sonnet
• Sonnet:
o 14 lines long
o Iambic pentameter
o Italian word: sonneto = little sound or brief statement
o Eerged i Italy i the 3’s
▪ At the time of the Renaissance, human subjectivity and emotions and ideas, and
reason become a center of attention → Copernican revolution
▪ Prior to this it was believed that the sun revolved around the earth
▪ No longer could human beings see themselves as uniquely positioned with the
undivided attention of God
▪ They ould’t see theseles of the eter ad piale of a orld reated y
God
▪ More human beings began to realize that they were the center of their own
world, and they had the destiny to be what they chose to be
▪ Huge change
Petrarchan Sonnet:
• Has a division between the Octave and the Sestat
• Within the 2, the volta or pause: a turn or break in the poem
• Octave: abba abba
o There are only two lines, stretched into about 8 lines
• Sestet: can have different rhyme schemes tending to be cdcdcdc
• Critical: there must not be a couplet at the end, thus, the final two lines must not rhyme
• What is this form good at?
o Wonderful for comparison and contrast
o An idea then a pause and then something that continues, reverses or somehow modifies
that idea → brilliance of the Petrarchan sonnet
o Taking those 8 lines to develop a prolonged simile, metaphor, or analogy
▪ A prolonged comparison between two things stretched over 8 or 14 lines
▪ Something is compared with something else at length and in detail
▪ Petrarchan Conceit
• An extended metaphor or analogy
• Comes from the Italian word Concetto
• Take a concept which is a comparison and develop it at length
o Often see a comparison between a female lover and something in the external world, so
the comparison is extended to a number of details:
▪ Female lover may be likened to a garden of flowers
• E.g. eyes = violets, skin be like petals, reast’s ay e like lilies…
▪ Comparison goes from several stages linking the beloved woman with a garden
▪ Women can also be compared to the seasons of the year
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English 1022: Week 9
• E.g. eyes like the summer sun, hair like rays of sunlight, but sometimes
in winter she gets afully old ad idifferet ad does’t are aout
the ale…
o Petrarchan convention tends to objectify women → woman becomes a desirable object
to the male
o The women is related to the natural world in a way that is extremely Eurocentric
o They all assume that the women is connected to the natural world, whereas the man
seems to be connected to the world of culture
▪ Women = nature
▪ Man = culture
o Strongly masculanist, Eurocentric, and weighted toward the depiction of comparing
women to the natural world
o Male lover
▪ Usually unhappy
▪ Blows hot and cold because he falls from moments of despair to moments of
elation where he thinks he might get the women
▪ Craving the extremes of desire
▪ The man likens himself to a soldier outside a fortress which refuses to let him in
▪ May compare himself to a garden who is prepared to tend to the lilies
▪ Compares himself to a ship at sea → ready to go to sea if only she would let him
(the storm)
• Sonnet 18: page 499
o “hall I opare thee to a suer’s day?
o He is rejecting the analogy
o Poetry has the ability to make someone immortal
o As long as this poem exists, she will exist
• Sonnet 30?
o We get the impression that this is about a real woman and someone who is NOT perfect
o He is REJECTING the Petrarchan objective
• The Petrarchan sonnet is linked to Petrarchan conceit and Petrarchan love which is idealizing
love and setting women on a pedestal
Shakespearean:
• Divides into 3 quatrains and a couplet
o Quatrain: 3 groups of 4 lines
• Good for developing a series of analogies and then an argument of some kind
• Step by step argument, leading to the couplet which summarizes the argument
• Why did this develop in England? Why did’t “hakespeare use the Petrarha?
• Two arguments:
o Nationalistic: the English mind is more logical than the Italian and therefore required a
step by step argument structure → dumb argument because there are so many logical
Italians and there is no reason to believe that people who live in hot countries are hot
headed
o Linguistic: English is a language with fewer ... → better argument and more powerful
▪ Carrying a single line across 8 lines is much more difficult in English than in
Italian
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