British Literature FINAL

Early Modern Period

Renaissance in England; 1476 printing press brought to England

Lyric poetry

Personal, reflective poetry that reveals the speaker's thoughts and feelings about the subject (tends to be religious/first person/musical)

Narrative poetry

poetry that tells a story (may not rhyme)

Petrarch

14th century; the father of the sonnet/lyric poetry; from Italy;

Rime (collection of poems) sonnets

Secular (not about God) and humanist

About system of courtship/rules/adultery

Art of love/rules of love

Wrote sonnet sequences

Medieval period

476 fall of Rome

The church/Christian/didactic literature

Sir Thomas Wyatt, "The Long Love that in my Thought doth Harbour"

Important lines:

The longë love that in my thought doth harbour

And in mine hert doth keep his residence,

Into my face presseth with bold pretence

And therein campeth, spreading his banner.

What may I do when my master feareth

But in the field with him to live and die?

For good is the life ending faithfully.

Notes:

-Desire vs duty

-Petrarchan (unrequited love/ 14 lines, octave 8 lines and sestet 6 lines; end rhyme)

Petrarchan sonnet

a sonnet consisting of an octave with the rhyme pattern abbaabba, followed by a sestet with the rhyme pattern cdecde or cdcdcd

Surrey, "Love, that doth reign and live within my thought"

Important lines:

Love that doth reign and live within my thought

And built his seat within my captive breast,

Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought,

Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.

For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pain;

Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove:

Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.

Notes:

-Flows better than Wyatt's "the long love"

-paradoxical nature of love (joy and pain) / unrequited

love personified as a warrior

-More naturalistic/less archaic

-3 quatrains with diff rhyme then ends with a couplet

-More colloquially English

Wyatt, "Whoso list to hunt"

Important lines:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

But as for me, hélas, I may no more.

There is written, her fair neck round about:

Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Notes:

-Pursuing a woman = like hunting a deer can't catch (frustrating)

-Tired/weary

-Double meanings (sun/son and deer/dear)

-Caesar= veiled reference to Henry 8th?

Wyatt, "They flee from me"

Important lines:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Notes:

- Woman who used to seek him now fleeing

-Stanzaic (not sonnet)

-Women used to be meek/passive, but now they're wild

-weird/brutal end (thinking about what she deserves)

-iambic pentameter?

-About Anne/affair with Anne Boleyn, one of Henry VIII's wives?

Sir Philip Sidney; Astrophil and Stella 1: Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show

Important lines:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,

"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

Notes:

-Writer's block

-Petrarchan

-Iambic hexameter (though first foot is a trochee, not an iamb)

-He is pregnant (has stuff that needs to come out)

Sidney; Astrophil and Stella 2: Not at first sight, nor with a dribbèd shot

Important lines:

Not at first sight, nor with a dribbèd shot,

Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed:

To make myself believe that all is well,

While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.

Notes:

-Petrarchan/ Iambic hexameter (though first foot is a trochee not an iamb)

-besieged/enslaved/driven insane by love

-concludes that he now uses what is left of his mind to make himself "believe that all is well," while really the poet is in "hell"

-Volta: Now even that footstep of lost liberty

Volta

the shift or point of dramatic change in a poem

Donne, "The Flea"

Important lines:

Notes:

-Trying to seduce mistress by comparing sex to their blood mixing in the same flea that bit them

-Religious undertones (the union of speaker and mistress in the flea is like the Holy Trinity)

-3 stanzas

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