Love Poetry in the 19th Century
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry
• ‘ If the poet knows the act of representation is
fraught with problems, and if it is not clear to
what misprisions the poem might be
appropriated, then a structure which analyses
precisely the uncertainty, and which makes
that uncertainty belong to the struggle and
debate, a structure which fills that uncertainty
with content, is the surest way to establish
poetic form (14).
Gordon Braden Petrarchan Love and the Continental
Renaissance New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
• ‘the central tenacious fact of his life is his consuming,
unending desire for one woman’ p. 14.
• ‘What destiny of mine, what compulsion, or what
deception brings me unarmed back to the field where I
am always conquered? And if I escape from it, I shall
marvel; if I die, the loss is mine. Not loss at all, but
gain: so sweet in my heart are the sparks and the
bright lightning that dazzle and torment it, and in
which I take fire and am already burning for the
twentieth year’ p. 14. (Canz. 221, 1-8)
Gordon Braden Petrarchan Love and the Continental
Renaissance New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
• Elsewhere Petrarch writes that ‘the attraction
of women, the more fascinating it is, the more
dreadful and baleful, to say nothing of their
dispositions, than which there is naught more
fickle or more inimical to the love of repose’
p. 16.
• Petrarch affirms that ‘any ambition for literary
success was wholly submerged in the helpless
emotional turmoil of this experience’ p. 15.
Catherine Bates ‘Desire, Discontent, Parody: The Love Sonnet
in Early Modern England’ The Cambridge Companion to the
Sonnet
• ‘so long as she continues to deny her lover
what he says he wants, the identity of that ‘I’
remains affirmed as that of a subject, a
subject who desires. This is why the sonnet
mistress is usually held at a strategic distance’
p. 107.
Gordon Braden
• ‘If only that knot which Love ties around my
tongue when the excess of light overpowers
my mortal sight were loosened, I would take
boldness to speak words at that moment so
strange that they would make all who heard
them weep. But the deep wounds turn my
wounded heart forcefully away; I become
pale, and my blood hides itself’ p. 19
(Petrarch, Canzioniere 73, lines 79-90)
Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet
• Divided into octave and sestet.
• Octave rhyme scheme abba abba
• Change in rhyme for the sestet signifies
change in subject: the volta or turn.
• Sestet rhyme can have either 2 or 3 rhymes:
cdcdcd, cdecde, cddcdc, cdeced, cdcedc.
• No couplets to finish
English or Shakespearean Sonnet
• More flexible rhyme scheme
• 3 quatrains and a couplet.
• Quatrains divided by rhyme scheme: abab
cdcd efef gg
• Each quatrain develops a separate idea or
metaphor
• The turn in subject matter or the volta can be
placed after the second or third quatrain
W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning
of Poetry, London: Methuen, 1970.
• Rhyme imposes ‘upon the logical pattern of
expressed argument a kind of fixative
counterpattern of alogical implication’ 153.
• ‘The words of a rhyme, with their curious
harmony of sound and distinction of sense, are
an amalgam of the sensory and the logical, or an
arrest and precipitation of the logical in sensory
form; they are the icon in which the idea is
caught’ 165.
Mermin
• ‘In Sonnets from the Portuguese, however, the
speaker casts herself not only as the poet who
loves, speaks, and is traditionally male, but also
as the silent, traditionally female beloved.’ P. 352
• Dorothy Mermin, ‘The Female Poet and the
Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese’, ELH,
Vol. 48, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 351-367.