Due Mar 18
The Petrarchan Craze
Reading: Petrarch, the progenitor of the sonnet (pub. 1374):
- Il Canzoniere 1, ‘Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono’
- Il Canzoniere 3, ‘Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro’
- Il Canzoniere 190, ‘Una candida cerva sopra l’erba’
Reading: selected poems of Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Behn:
- Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella “1: Loving in truth” (pub. 1591)
- Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (pub. 1599)
- Shakespeare, Sonnet 106, “When in the chronicle of wasted time” (pub. 1609)
- John Donne, “The Good-Morrow” (pub. 1633)
- Aphra Behn, “Love Armed” (from a 1676 play)
Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:
- Several of these poems invite the beloved to join the poet somewhere. Quote a line where this happens, name the poet, and comment on the kind of place that’s imagined as conducive to love.
- Many of these poems praise or elevate the beloved. Quote a line where this happens, name the poet, and comment on the rhetorical strategy for praise.
- If you have a favorite love poem from this era that I failed to include on the list, introduce us to it and briefly explain why I should add it for next year.
- There are a host of lovely phrases in the reading today. Cite a short passage and comment on what makes it beautiful.
Invitations to the Beloved
⤹Click the reply button just below.
The line, “Come with me and be my love” (Marlowe) from The Passionate Shepard to his Love. This line directly invites the beloved to an imaginary pastoral setting. This place is like an ideal countryside, with valleys, groves, hills, and fields. To me this suggested that love thrives in a peaceful, natural world removed from society, where beauty and simplicity make romance effortless and perfect.
I agree with your point regarding love thriving in a world where beauty is prevalent. I would like to add on to your examples that Marlowe supplements more than just visual beauties, but incorporates a full sensory experience in regards to love. He explains that there are roses, rivers, and birdsongs, which are more than just visual spectacles, but fully immersive sensory experiences, showing that love isn’t just visual, it includes all aspects of our senses. Additionally it shows that nature is a participant in creating an environment where love can thrive.
Both Bryce and Campbell make great points regarding Marlowe’s imagined world of love, pleasure, and unity. I would like to expand on Campbell’s point about nature being involved heavily in this envisioned world. What stood out to me is that everything incorporated in this world is apart of the natural world. Nothing he writes about includes otherworldly, divine or impractical sources that couldn’t be cultivated from the real world. The boundaries of what’s possible and what’s not is clearly shown, as Marlowe describes rocks, shepherds flocks, leaves of Myrtle, and Ivy buds; all elements of Earthly and mortal origin. This goes to show that Marlowe needed not to look at the spiritual and supernatural world to encapsulate the beauty of this world–a world that he wants to build with his one and only lover.
That is a great point! You’ve touched on how Marlowe transforms the landscape from a simple backdrop into an active participant in the romance. I totally agree with you. Marlowe isn’t just showing us a “pretty picture.” Like you said, it’s a full sensory experience. When he talks about the “fragrant posies” (smell) and the “melodious birds” (sound), he is making the setting feel immersive. It’s like he’s saying love isn’t just something you feel inside, but something you can hear, smell, and touch in the world around you. This kind of “perfect nature” makes the love feel more natural and pure.
I agree with your interpretation, Bryce. Marlowe’s line really does frame love in a nonconforming, unique way–something that flourishes best in an idealized and pastoral escape. The invitation “Come with me and be my love” (Marlowe) isn’t just romantic, it also creates a whole imagined world where nature is perfectly harmonious and untouched by complications implicated by society. In that setting love feels effortless, almost even suspended in time.
Rhetorical Strategies for Praise
⤹Click the reply button just below.
In “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” the shepherd is asking his lover to come live with him, offering them great gifts, saying, for example, “…I will make thee beds of Roses / And a thousand fragrant posies, / A cap of flowers, and a kirtle / Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle…” In this poem, Christopher Marlowe elevates the beloved by having the shepherd offer these gifts as one might offer sacrifices to a god, and, by leading the reader to believe the lover is worthy of such praise, the beloved’s stature is elevated above that of the shepherd.
Favorite Poems from the Era
⤹Click the reply button just below.
Beautiful poetic phrases
⤹Click the reply button just below.
One of the passages that particularly struck me as beautiful comes from the last stanza of John Donne’s “The Good-Morrow”. In that last stanza Donne writes, “Whatever dies, was not mixed equally; / If our two loves be one, or, thou and I / Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die” (Donne, “The Good-Morrow”). What drew me to this passage specifically is Donne’s take on undying love where he says something can only die if its components aren’t mixed equally, therefore, our love cannot die as long as we give to this relationship equally and stick to this goal in pursuit of eternal love. This take also captures the fragility of love and how it rests on such a delicate balance that requires unwavering maintenance from both parties, which further captures the complexity of love by revealing a tension so central to the concept. Love can be such a strong force as to bind two people together forever and yet that same thing that can be so incomprehensibly strong relies on the maintenance of an extremely fragile equilibrium from humans who are consistently unreliable. This stanza captures as much of the essence of love as it can in its short length: love is so strong yet so delicate and is entrusted onto beings who are perhaps equally as strong and as delicate. Overall, I’m just a really big fan of the messages conveyed in this stanza and especially the diction used to convey those messages.
One line that struck me as beautiful was in Shakespeares “When in the chronicle of wasted time” where he states, “And beauty making beautiful old rhyme / In praise of ladies dead…” This line is beautiful because it gently folds together time, memory, and admiration. Shakespeare imagines old writings that praised women of the past, and the phase above shows a sense of reverence, as even though these women are gone, their beauty and grace lives on through language.