The Petrarchan sonnet, named after Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, was introduced to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the 1500s. It consists of two stanzas with 14 lines and a rhyming system of abba, abba, cde, cde. Petrarch wrote about unattainable love, inspiring the first generation of English sonnets. The Shakespearean sonnet was later developed due to the unsuitability of the Petrarchan rhyming system for English.
The Petrarchan sonnet was the first type of sonnet to be introduced in England. It was first translated by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early 1500s. This type of sonnet is named after the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, a 14th-century Italian. It is a poem of two stanzas with an octave, a sextet and a total of 14 lines. The Petrarchan sonnet has a system of rhymes abba, abba, cde, cde.
Francesco Petrarca was an Italian humanist, scholar and poet. Petrarch, better known as Petrarch in the English-speaking world, wrote a total of 366 sonnets as well as numerous letters and treatises on a variety of subjects. His most beloved work of his, however, was an epic poem written in Latin called “Africa.” Despite his love of poetry, few others have held it in such high regard. Such was the quality of his writing that Pietro Bembo, in the 16th century, used Petrarch, Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio as inspiration for his development of modern Italian.
A typical Petrarchan sonnet is a 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter. The sonnet is divided into two stanzas: the octave and the sextet. The octave is an opening of eight lines, proposing a problem. The sextet is a closer of six lines, commenting on the problem proposed in the octave.
The theme of a typical Petrarchan sonnet is that of unattainable love. Most of Petrarch’s sonnets were written about the love of his life; Laura. Unattainable love is seen as one of the purest loves because nothing distracts it. A good example of the use of love in Petrarch’s sonnet is “The Long Love That in My Heart Doth Harbour” as translated by Sir Thomas Wyatt:
“The long love that dwells in my heart
And in my heart it keeps its abode,
In my face it presses with daring pretence,
And there campeth, displaying his standard.
She who learns me to love and to suffer,
And he wants my trust and the neglect of my lust
Be restrained by reason and shame and reverence,
With its robustness it takes displeasure.
With which love flees the forest of the heart,
Leaving his enterprise with grief and weeping,
And there it hides and does not appear.
What can I do when my master is scared?
But in the field with him to live and die?
For the good is life that ends faithfully.”
Translations of Petrarch’s sonnet inspired the first generation of English sonnets. The rhyming system, however, is better suited to Italian and Latin than to English. This led to the development of the Shakespearean sonnet. The theme of love and women later led to the anti-Petrarchan sonnet, which criticized women instead of exulting them. In the 16th century Bembo tried to make the Petrarchan style the dominant lyric form in Italian.
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