A Brief History of the Sonnet you wanted to know all about but were always afraid to ask. (All rights to this book reserved by Dr Koshy AV)
Chapter 1 - Petrarca
The reviving interest in forms and in the sonnet has made me decide to write a short book on it.
As usual, it will be peppered with poets and examples, and my own idiosyncratic views in my own inimitable style, of all of them, the poets, and them, the examples.
The sonnet as you all know or don't, started in Italy. My interest in it is due to a simple fact, the person who is said by some to have started it, the one you can call its "father" if you want to, or Petrarch, won my approval not so much by the form alone, but by doing a sequence as well as writing all of them about a woman called Laura and dedicating it to her thereby. You may call it the human interest angle. Here is a poet, and a muse, and a muse who was inspiring enough to make the poet write a whole series of poems in a particular form that would make him, her, and the form immortal. Stuff of legends and fiction, don't you all think? Imagine how beautiful Laura must have been. Just imagine!
As a matter of fact, the Petrarchan sonnet was not invented by Petrarch but evolved by many Renaissance poets and codified or rather 'rigidified', if you will let me use such a word, into 14 lines with an octave and sestet, or if that is too technical for you into two stanzas of eight and six lines respectively. The rhyme scheme was slightly flexible in the last six lines but always abba abba in the first eight, but generally, the next six followed patterns like cde cde or ab ab cc and all that. The theme was usually Love, woman, women, sex, romance, courtly and otherwise, pastoral or bucolic, as often it is, when it starts out, or started out, as a light form, but there was really no such injunction or order that the sonnet should be any such thing only.
To return to Petrarch and Laura, like Dante and Beatrice, the author of the Canzonieri only saw her once, perhaps when she was hardly 15, but wrote poems to her all his life, though she herself died in her thirties, perhaps of the bubonic plague. It is a tale of unrequited love! The man credited with starting the R/renaissance, at least of Italy, the first tourist, Latin expert, Cicero's translator etcetera, was so madly in love that he kept writing love songs to Laura all his life though she was wedded and bedded by someone else and had that man's children. Petrarch never even got the chance to wine her and dine her, let alone wed or bed her. We remember him finally not for being the friend of Boccaccio or other things like his Dad knowing Dante, although obviously these things matter in showing us why he too wanted to write poetry and excel at it, but for his impassioned love sonnets to Laura whom he met and who passed away in the first half of the 14th century. He saw her in a church on Easter in 1327 and strangely enough, she died on a Good Friday in 1348. Just 38 years old. He was haunted by her beauty and his best sonnets are the dark ones after her death.
Gli occhi di ch’io parlai sì caldamente,
E le braccia e le mani e i piedi e ’l viso
Che m’avean sì da me stesso diviso
E fatto singular dall’altra gente;
Le crespe chiome d’or puro lucente,
E ’l lampeggiar dell’angelico riso
Che solean far in terra un paradiso,
Poca polvere son, che nulla sente.
Ed io pur vivo; onde mi doglio e sdegno,
Rimaso senza ’l lume ch’amai tanto,
In gran fortuna e ’n disarmato legno.
Or sia qui fine al mio amoroso canto:
Secca è la vena dell’usato ingegno,
E la cetera mia rivolta in pianto.
Those eyes, ’neath which my passionate rapture rose,
The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile
Could my own soul from its own self beguile,
And in a separate world of dreams enclose,
The hair’s bright tresses, full of golden glows,
And the soft lightning of the angelic smile
That changed this earth to some celestial isle,—
Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows.
And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn,
Left dark without the light I loved in vain,
Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn;
Dead is the source of all my amorous strain,
Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn,
And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.
Translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Note the use of iambic petametre in the English version with ten syllables. Petrarch used many more, at least fourteen or fifteen in each line. Note also how Petrarch uses only one rhyme for the entire last six lines. But note, most of all, the pathos and melancholy of his poem for a woman he had seen only once in his life, a phenomenon we can no longer understand or grasp but only marvel at! Maybe, in some cases, it was only adhering to a convention but not in Petrarch's, and in that of many other poets like Dante and many others I will talk of later which is what makes it intriguing to a twenty-first-century sonneteer like who I am.
In this case, you can see that the first eight lines (octave) of the sonnet deal with Petrarch's thought/s on Laura and then his thoughts on himself mourning her in the next six lines (sestet). The division is made evident in the rhyme scheme, even if typed out just as 14 lines, as it is in some places. The stanzas have been demarcated by me for greater ease and clarity for the reader.
Sources: 1. https://www.artlovingitaly.com/petrarco-petrarch-sonnets-laura-infatuation-unrequited-love/ for the life/lives)
2. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50307/50307-h/50307-h.htm (for the poem in Italian and its translation)
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