Tara Anderson
Briana Corbett
Nichola Dehaven
Zainab Mithani
Jay Van
 He was born Francesco Petrarca on July 20th, 1304.
 He was born in exile in a town called Arezzo.
 Petrarch was studying to become a lawyer because his
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father wanted him to study the field.
He did not enjoy law and believed that being a lawyer was a
dishonest profession.
Petrarch wanted to be a man of letters.
When his father died, he did not leave a lot of money, so
Petrarch had no choice than to become a priest.
Petrarch was known as the father of Humanism, and many
call him father of the Renaissance.
 In 1327, Petrarch met Laura for the first time.
 She would be his inspiration when it came to writing
poetry.
 There is not a lot of information on Laura. It is said that her
and Petrarch had little or no contact. He instantly fell in
love with her although she was married. There was no
affair.
 Most of his poems in Il Canzoniere are about his love for
Laura.
 Some say that Laura was not an actual person but a way for
Petrarch to generally talk about love in his poems.
 Il Canzoniere is Petrarch’s most famous work.
 Il Canzoniere means Song Book in English. It is also
known as Rhyme Sparse or in English, Scattered
Rhymes.
 The poems were written over a span of about 40 years.
 There are 366 love sonnets, mostly about Laura. 263
were written while she was alive and 103 after her
death.
 Sonnets are lyric rather than narrative poems. Instead
of telling a story, they express different aspects of a
single thought, mood, or emotion. These feelings are
sometimes resolved or summed up in the last lines of
the poem. Originally sonnets were short poems
accompanied by music but evolved into more
structured love poetry in thirteenth century Italy.
 These probably developed from the canzone or from
Italian folk song. The earliest Italian sonneteer was
Guittone d'Arezzo, but the most famous is the Italian
poet Petrarch whose Canzoniere written in the
fourteenth century includes 317 sonnets written for his
beloved Laura.
 Italian sonnet form has also been used by English
poets. Milton, for example, was one of them.
 Francesco Petrarca was an Italian scholar and poet who
created the traditional sonnet form, which is known as
both the Italian and Petrarchan sonnet. This type of
sonnet has three main thematic conventions: 1) love
goes unsatisfied, 2) the beloved of the poem is
elevated to superiority and 3) the lover is self-abasing.
The sonnet was introduced into English by Wyatt in the early 16th
century. His sonnets and those of his contemporary the Earl of Surrey
were chiefly translations from the Italian of Petrarch and the French of
writers such as Ronsard. Sir Philip Sidney's sequence Astrophel and
Stella (1591) started off a tremendous vogue for sonnet sequences; the
next two decades saw sonnet sequences by Shakespeare, Edmund
Spenser, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, William
Drummond of Hawthornden, and many others. These sonnets were all
essentially inspired by the Petrarchan tradition, and generally treat of
the poet's love for some woman; the exception is Shakespeare's
sequence. In the 17th century, the sonnet was adapted to other
purposes, with John Donne and George Herbert writing religious
sonnets, and John Milton using the sonnet as a general meditative
poem. Both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan rhyme schemes were
popular throughout this period, as well as many variants.
The fashion for the sonnet went out with the Restoration, and hardly any sonnets
were written between 1670 and Wordsworth's time. However, sonnets came
back strongly with the French Revolution. Wordsworth himself wrote several
sonnets, of which the best-known are "The world is too much with us" and the
sonnet to Milton; his sonnets were essentially modelled on Milton's. Keats and
Shelley also wrote major sonnets; Keats's sonnets used formal and rhetorical
patterns inspired partly by Shakespeare, and Shelley innovated radically,
creating his own rhyme scheme for the sonnet "Ozymandias". Sonnets were
written throughout the 19th century, but, apart from Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and the sonnets of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, there were few very successful traditional sonnets. Gerard Manley
Hopkins wrote several major sonnets, often in sprung rhythm, of which the
greatest is The Windhover, and also several sonnet variants such as the 10 1/2
line Pied Beauty and the 24-line That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire. By the end of
the 19th century, the sonnet had been adapted into a general-purpose form of
great flexibility.
Modernist period, Robert Frost was the only one to use the sonnet
regularly, although William Butler Yeats wrote the major sonnet
Leda and the Swan, which used half rhymes. Wilfred Owen's
sonnet Anthem for Doomed Youth was another sonnet of the
early 20th century. W.H. Auden wrote two sonnet sequences and
several other sonnets throughout his career, and widened the
range of rhyme-schemes used considerably. Auden also wrote
one of the first unrhymed sonnets in English, "The Secret Agent“
(1928). Half-rhymed, unrhymed, and even unmetrical sonnets
have been very popular since 1950; perhaps the best works in the
genre are Seamus Heaney's Glanmore Sonnets and Clearances,
both of which use half rhymes. The 1990s have seen something
of a formalist revival, however, and several traditional sonnets
have been written in the past decade.
Doth any maiden seek the glorious fame
Of chastity, of strength, of courtesy?
Gaze in the eyes of that sweet enemy
Whom all the world doth as my lady name!
How honour grows, and pure devotion's flame,
How truth is joined with graceful dignity,
There thou may'st learn, and what the path may be
To that high heaven which doth her spirit claim;
There learn soft speech, beyond all poet's skill,
And softer silence, and those holy ways
Unutterable, untold by human heart.
But the infinite beauty that all eyes doth fill,
This none can copy! since its lovely rays
Are given by God's pure grace, and not by art.
a
b
b
a
a
b
b
a
c
d
e
c
d
e
 The rhyme scheme of a typical Italian/Petrarchan Sonnet.
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It uses end rhymes, rhymes at the end of a line. This
sonnet follows an a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a-c-d-e-c-d-e.
a: fame, name, flame, claim
b: courtesy, enemy, dignity, may be
c: skill, fill
d: ways, rays
e: heart, art
 There can be variations on the last six lines as some
Petrarchan Sonnets use instead of c-d-e-c-d-e, c-d-c-c-d-c.
Another variation could be c-d-c-d-c-d
 An Italian/Petrarchan Sonnet is usually broken up into
two parts. The first part is the first 8 lines which are
considered the octave. The octave is made up of two
quatrains, a group of 4 lines (a-b-b-a). The content of
the octave section of the poem usually is involved in
presenting a problem or begins to paint in a certain
idea. After the first 8 lines comes a group of 6 lines
with a different rhyme scheme, The c-d-e-c-d-e in this
sonnet. This is the sestet and is composed of two
tercets, a group of 3 lines (c-d-e). The Volta usually
comes at sestet.
[Beginning of the Octave]
Doth any maiden seek the glorious fame
a
Of chastity, of strength, of courtesy?
a
Gaze in the eyes of that sweet enemy
b
Whom all the world doth as my lady name!
A
How honour grows, and pure devotion's flame,
a
How truth is joined with graceful dignity,
b
There thou may'st learn, and what the path may be
b
To that high heaven which doth her spirit claim;
a
First quatrain
Second quatrain
[End of the Octave]
[Beginning of Sestet]
There learn soft speech, beyond all poet's skill,
c
And softer silence, and those holy ways
d
Unutterable, untold by human heart.
e
First tercet (Volta or turn).
But the infinite beauty that all eyes doth fill,
c
This none can copy! since its lovely rays
d
Are given by God's pure grace, and not by art.
e
[End of Sestet]
Second Tercet
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
a
b
a
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
b
c
d
c
d
e
f
e
f
g
g
This is a typical rhyme scheme for an
English/Shakespearean sonnet. The sonnet follows end
rhymes in the pattern of a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g.
a: minds, finds
b: love, remove
c: mark, bark
d: shaken, taken
e: cheeks, weeks
f: come, doom
g: proved, loved
The English/Shakespearean sonnet uses the structural unit of quatrains as well (remember a quatrain is a group
of four lines). But the structure of this sonnet is different as there are 3 quatrains and the quatrains are not
grouped in to an octave. They stand independently. In these sonnets, rhyming couplets follow as the last two
rhyming lines of the sonnet. The volta in English/Shakespearean sonnets can come in the third quatrain but
in Shakespeare's sonnets the volta comes in the couplet at the end.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
a
b
a
b
First quatrain
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
c
d
c
d
Second quatrain
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
e
f
e
f
Third quatra
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
g
g
Couplet,Volta
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
a
b
b
a
a
b
b
a
c
d
c
d
e
e
(volta)
 The rhyme scheme of this poem seems to take to both
Italian and English sonnets. The a-b-b-a a-b-b-a is
similar to a the Petrarchan sonnet we previously
covered. But the next six lines follow more of an
English style with the c-d-c-d and the rhyming couplet
at the end. This seems to be a hybrid of the rhyming
styles.