Vernacular Renaissance Poetry

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Vernacular Renaissance Poetry

• The Sonnet

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Origins

• Sonnet means little song in Italian, but it is
  a precise lyric form.
• Originated among Sicilian court poets of the 13th
  century, influenced by the love poetry of the
  Provencal troubadours
• Reached its highest expression in Petrarch's
  "Canzonieri," a sequence of 365 love poems
  addressed to "Laura," his idealized beloved.
• Thomas Wyatt Henry Surrey, introduced the
  sonnets to England in the early 16th century

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The Petrarchan Sonnet

• Composed of 14 lines, usually in iambic
  pentameter
• It has a particular rhyming scheme for
  abba,abba,cde,cde
• Divided into two parts
• the octave (eight lines), used to present a
  thesis, an argument
• the ninth line is called the volta (it. turn),
  generally signaled by words such as but, yet,
  then, or exclamations.
• the sestet (six lines) gives the conclusion,
  reason, or counter-argument for what was in the
  octave

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The English Sonnet

• Wyatt's sonnet, The long love that in my thought
  doth harbor (1.527) Surrey's Love, that doth
  reign and live within my thought (1.571) are both
  based on the same Petrarchan original.
• The English poets started to play subtly with the
  sonnet structure for different effects
• Sidney favoured a weakened volta in the 9th
  line, and a stronger one in the 13th
• This developed into the final riming couplet of
  the Shakespearian sonnet