The Renaissance Sonnet

Sonnet

• 14 lines

• iambic pentameter (10 syllable - da-DUM)

• volta

• Petrarchan: octave - volta - sestet

• Shakespearean: three quatrains and a couplet

Rennaisance Sonnet

• 16-17th century

• darker, more complex, self critical themes

• metaphor for male self display

Renaissance And Individuality

• the period of the individual

• self expression in literature

• the self as containing interiority

Renaissance and Love

• the medieval focused on love between individuals

• in the renaissance love becomes a means for talking about politics and engaging with serious themes

The Arrival of The Sonnet

• comes from Italy

• pinned down as being brought over by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard

• notion of courtliness and aristocracy

• ideas of illumination and enlightenment

Sonnet Scenarios

• the devoted suitor and his cool, cruel mistress

• the mundane frustrations of being in love

• the miseries of excess and desire + what desire does to the human subject

• paradox and uncertainty

• contradictions

• courtly subject

Wyatt’s Sonnet “I Find No Peace”

• Translated From Petrarch’s Rime 134

• there is a sense of restlessness

• a glass is brought in and then broken and shattered

• broken syntax of the passage → torturous

• tradition in Wyatt’s poetry of conceit - illusive, we feel before we understand

• powerful physical images

• precise w/ formal rules (in metre)

Sir Phillip Sidney Sonnet 15 from Astrophil and Stella

Lady Mary Wroth “My Paine Still Smother’d’

• writing back to the tradition of earlier male poets

• using a female figure - inverts the scenario

• man is not to be trusted - speaks to sexual politics

• uses metaphor of a grounded ship (maritime - male tradition)

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Desire And Want In The Sonnet

• juxtaposition of the positive state of desiring something and the negative state of wanting and not having

How Is Wanting Represented

• anticipatory space waiting to be filled by a promised object → injustice or impatience

• object once possessed and lost ie. perfume in the air → betrayal or ineptitude

• physical wound → surprise or pain

Distance In Sonnets

mistress is usually held at a strategic distance

• the subject is the I who desires

• abstract lover

• the lover is not a being but an idealised element

Oxymorons and Paradox in Sonnet

• subject is in a paradoxical position

• experience the negative state of not having and the positive state of yearning

• results in a strange desire

• more occupied with own desire than the object

Love Personified In The Sonnet

• figure that appears as love → Cupid, Eros, Desire

• own desire in personified form

• stage encounters with what it desire’s face to face

• relates to Love as much as he does to what he desires revealing the narcissistic nature of desire

Time in Sonnets

• horizontal and vertical time:

• horizontal: tells the story in a linear, chronological manner towards a final end

• vertical: the present moment and current situation - takes precedence - endless arena

Mary Wroth: Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: 17 (‘Sweet shades why do you seek to give delight’);

• Petrarchan Sonnet

• ask nature how it is perfect while she is grieving

• sibilance in line 1 - mimics the soft flow of nature

• juxtaposition ‘delight vs vilde’ ‘heat vs. frosts’

• joy as personified

• typical paradox of desire and want

Wyatt → ‘The Long Love that in my Thought doth Harbour’

• military metaphor for love

• torn between desire and a social environment that restricts it

• love is personified as a knight or commander - allows face to face encounter - in love with love

• military imagry

Shakespeare, Sonnet 20

• each line has a feminine ending - extra unstressed syllable

• different kinds of love and affection

• open male friendship in the renaissance

• nature personified

• androgynous male lover - fluid concepts / paradoxes

• misogynistic depictions of women

The Visual Appeal Of The Sonnet

• container

• synergy - unity of meaning

• tension between the unfolding of the poem and it all being gathered up as one unity of meaning - paradox

The Poem And The World - William Drummond - ‘The Book Of The World’

• well constructed - articulates a thought or idea

• metaphor for the world as a book to study, ponder on

• we are not paying attention

• the meaning: divine, God’s existence

• order, structure, unity of the world emphasised through the Sonnets form

Playing With Disorder - Robert Herrick - Delight In Disorder

• pastoral world of beauty and pleasure

• aesthetics of the world put into the aesthetics of the sonnet

• focus on clothing + visual stimuli

• the pleasure of disorder → form of sweetness, joy or excitement

• pleasure in department from norms - lengths of line and organisation of words

Improper Objects - Richard Barnfield - Cynthia

• deploy the sonnet form in a way that is different from normal expectations

• following most rules - emphasises departure

• loves self - not a women

• go against the standard expectations of love in poetry and society

• also seen in Shakespeare Sonnet 20

The Poem In Place - Catherine Dyer - My Dearest Dust

• visual shape and organisation

• written on a tomb - leave a mark in the world

• sustains domestic intimacy through death

Marking Time - John Milton - When I Consider

• use of poetic voice is imagined as a kind of public speech

• no hint of romantic relationships or aesthetic joy

• statement about place in time

• reflecting on blindness

• meditation on his own situation