Petrarchan Sonnet

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Petrarchan [pet-rar-kan] characteristic of, or derived from, the work of the major Italian poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74), especially his sonnets and other love lyrics in Italian. The [[Petrarchan sonnet]], also known as the Italian sonnet, is divided into an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet normally rhyming cdecde, and thus avoids the final couplet found in the English or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet. The Petrarchan conceit is an exaggerated comparison or striking oxymoron of the kind found in sonnets written under Petrarch's influence: common varieties are the comparison of a lady's eyes with the sun, and the description of love in terms of its pleasurable pains. The widespread imitation of Petrarch's love poetry in Europe, reaching its height in the 16th century, is known as Petrarchism. This important imitative tradition is marked by the increasingly conventional presentation of courtly love, in which the despairing poet speaks in fanciful and paradoxical terms of his torments as the worshipper of a disdainful mistress. A notable Petrarchan convention is the blazon or catalogue of the lady's physical beauties: coral lips, pearly teeth, alabaster neck etc. Petrarchism is evident in French poets of the Pléiade and in the English sonneteers from Wyatt to Shakespeare.

"Petrarchan" The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Christopher Baldick. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Temple University. 1 February 2007 < <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t56.e726> >

Example:

William Wordsworth

"The world is too much with us"

THE World is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, 5

The winds that will be howling at all hours

And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,— 10

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Rachaelsmith 00:05, 1 February 2007 (EST)