During the Renaissance, English poets adapted the
Petrarchan sonnet, originated by Italian poet Petrarch, to suit English tastes,
language, and ideas. There were several changes from the original Petrarchan model in
structure and in expression of ideas. href="http://www.petrarch.net/">Petrarch, or Francesco Petrarca, lived from
1304 to 1374. English poets
Wyatt and the Earl of Surry developed the Renaissance English sonnet in the early 1500s,
roughly two hundred years later. Spenser modified Surry’s sonnet form and his form was
in turn modified by poets like Drayton who perfected the English form later made famous
by Shakespeare.
Petrarch
developed his form to express two contrastive ideas that end by revealing the tension
between them or submitting to a resolution of the tension. For example, in Petrarch's
sonnet that begins, "She ruled in beauty o'er this heart of mine," Petrarch contrasts
the qualities of his deceased beloved at her death (“blessings must resign”) to his
suffering ("crushed with care") and the philosophical realization of what death is:
“Assuredly but dust and shade we are, ….”
The
English sonnet added a broader base for contrast so that
English sonnets often progress through three distinct contrastive stages that end in a
final ephiphanic resolution. For example, in Shakespeare's Sonnet
18, the speaker answers his question for 8 lines in the negative saying
why he will not compare his love "to a summer's day." In lines 5 through 8, a minor
contrast turns from a discussion of nature to a metaphorical philosophical consideration
of the cause of fading beauty: "By chance or nature's changing course
untrimm'd."
At line 9, Shakespeare brings in the major
contrast element by turning to consideration of the metaphorical beauty of the "summer's
day" of his beloved. He calls her beauty "thy eternal summer" and says it "shall not
fade." This leads to the turn to the contrasting epiphanic resolution in the couplet
that states his beloved shall live eternally, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can
see," in the sonnet he writes in praise.
While
Petrarchan sonnets have one major contrastive element with
a resolution to the contrastive tension, English sonnets
may have two, with a contrastive resolution, often in the form of an epiphany. This
change developed out of the change to href="http://www.sonnets.org/basicforms.htm">Petrarch's
structure. Petrarch wrote sonnets of an octave (or octet)
followed by a sestet [8 lines followed by 6 lines]. The turn to the contrasting
comparison comes at line 9; the turn is called the
volta. The fixed rhyme scheme of the
octave is a b b a a b b a. It was
followed by a rhyme schemes in the sestet which may be any of
these:
c d c d c
d
c d d c d
c
c d e c d
e
c d e c e
d
c d c e d
c
These rhyme schemes created a tight formal and
ideological structure with the resolution lines being an integrated part of the
sestet.
The href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5791">English sonnet
structure changed to three quatrains with rhyming pairs in each:
abab cdcd efef. The quatrains are
followed by a couplet: gg. The couplet
separates the resolution from the quatrains thus facilitating the epiphanic resolution.
The three sets of rhyming pairs separate the three quatrains from each other so the
English sonnet may have two voltas,
turns in contrastive thought, at lines 5 and 9.
No comments:
Post a Comment