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.
Among these poems that invite the beloved to join the poet somewhere, the one that stuck out to me was The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, where Christopher Marlowe states, “And if these pleasures may thee move, / Come live with me, and be my love.” Marlowe describes a vast, wide land, such as a valley or fields, and mentions sitting on top of rocks somewhere where there’s water, like a river, and there are various amounts of flowers like roses. I believe Marlowe illustrates this image to produce a lovely, beautiful, and attractive setting for the reader to fall in love with, and multiple times even asks the beloved to join the poet here. I think Marlowe does this to ensure readers understand the temptation, desire, love, and attraction for the poet to be with the beloved, and does this by inviting them in a very carefully constructed manner.
To add on to your point, the landscape Marlowe builds does function as more than scenery. You mention how “this image produce a lovely, beautiful, and attractive setting,” I think what makes this especailly effective is that the setting is also a argument. This can be seen in the line “And we will sit upon the Rocks, / Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks, / By shallow Rivers to whose falls / Melodious birds sing Madrigals.” Here Marlowe is not just describing a place but painting a picture so full and sensory that the beloved would feel almost foolish to refuse. The landscape accumulates into evidence, and the invitation becomes something closer to persuasion.
Rhetorical Strategies for Praise
⤹Click the reply button just below.
Favorite Poems from the Era
⤹Click the reply button just below.
Beautiful poetic phrases
⤹Click the reply button just below.
One of the phrases that i find beautiful is “I left all my labour to follow her: as a miser, in search of treasure, / makes his toil lose its bitterness in delight.” (190. ‘Una candida cerva sopra l’erba’). What makes this so beautiful is that the poet mix and compare both obsession and love. A miser is someone who work intensely for money, however here, they are shown instead of pain but rather the excitement to find treasure. This highlight the beauty and the value of how desire can transform effort into pleasure. This shows the common feeling that is often skipped by people which when something gets hard, people usually focus on the exhausting part instead of how the feeling after is so beautiful that worth every second of the tiredness
I also thought this passage was particularly beautiful. Later he adds “Touch me not,’ in diamonds and topaz, was written round about her lovely neck”(190). This furthers the idea of obsession as I think we as humans want what we can’t have. The narrator may love the deer for its beauty but he becomes truly obsessed with it because he can’t ever have it for himself. Its like Socrates said in symposium about how love cannot be beautiful as love yearns for beauty and to yearn is to never have. The speaker yearns for the deer’s beauty but he does not ever get it because at the end of the poem he “fell into water, and she vanished” (190). Connecting back to the quote in the original response about the Miser, I think a Miser would be someone who yearns for wealth and becomes obsessed as they never have enough the way our narrator will never have enough of the deers beauty.
I agree with your analysis of this metaphor, especially with how you desire to making effort feel pleasurable rather than tiring. This idea is further discussed when Petrarch describes himself as caught, “between vain hope and vain sadness.” While you showed how love can transform labor into something exciting, this line suggests that desire is not always stable. Petrarch presents love as a more precarious idea, setting it trapped between two extremes.
A moment I found praticularly beautiful in the readings from today is located in “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” where the Shepherd is changing certain raw materials into luxurious jewelry for “his love” so she may come and live with him. Lines such as “a belt of straw and ivy buds” (17) and “with cloral clasps and amber studs” (18) are extremely interesting to me because it shows the idealized version of the life that the shepherd wants to give his love. It’s beautiful but also deeply tragic because it shows the deep passion from the shepherd to his love but his current occupation leaves him unable to give her the physical adornment he wishes to. Instead, he creates this fantastical reality where all the current supplies from his farm and animals transform into beautiful gifts for his love, a testament to his continued adornment for her