Hi, I'm Rebecca Balcarcel. Let's find out where the sonnet comes from, the sonnet being
one of the most popular forms in the English language. You might think started with Shakespeare.
But it didn't. It actually started in Italy, with a guy named Francesco Petrarch. And Shakespeare
picked it up a couple-hundred years later. Let's find out more.
Frank in love, and how it led to the most famous of poem forms, the sonnet. Frank is
my pet name for Francesco, of course, and we'll see how love is what inspired him to
be so prolific with his sonnet writing. So here we have Francesco,
born in 1304, couple-hundred years before Shakespeare. In the letter he wrote to posterity,
he talked about his early life, and he mentions his
schooling. He says, "I learned as much of grammer, logic, and rhetoric as my age permitted,
or rather, as much as it is customary to teach in school. How little that is, dear reader,
thou knowest." This is funny because, obviously,
he doesn't think he learned that much in school, and we can sometimes relate. Young Francesco
was pretty promising, and everybody thought, wow, he
could be something like a lawyer. He started to study law. He says, "I then set out to
study law. I heard the whole body of the civil law, and would, as many thought, have distinguished
myself later, had I but continued my studies.
I gave up the subject altogether, however, so soon as it was no longer necessary to consult
the wishes of my parents. My reason was that although the dignity of the law, which is
doubtless very great, I felt it to be habitually degraded
by those who practiced it." So like now, sometimes lawyers were doing unscrupulous things, and
he did not want to go along with that. He said, "It went
against me painfully to acquire an art which I would not practice dishonestly, and could
hardly hope to exercise otherwise." That means that successful lawyers had to be dishonest,
and therefore, he just couldn't do it. He goes on: "Had I
made the latter attempt, my scupulousness would doubtless have been ascribed to simplicity."
He means that, if he had tried to be an honest lawyer,
people would have thought he was stupid, that he was simple. And so this was not going to
work at all. He says, "At the age of two and twenty I returned home." Now what's he going
to do? Well, let's go back to the idea of the church. Turns
out that his father was the one who wanted him to be a lawyer, and his father died, so
he was able to go to his first love, which was the church.
In four years he completed the minor orders, and he becomes a diplomat for the church.
That means he wasn't a priest, but rather, he would go around, broker peace treaties,
stuff like that. Now this job allowed him to travel quite a
bit. He was in France when something very important happened. Young Petrarch, early
twenties, is sitting in church, when suddenly he sees Laura.
So, as the historian Peter Sadlon puts it, "It's April 6th, 1327, Good Friday, at an
Easter mass, when Petrarch sees Laura for the first time." Now we don't really know
who Laura even was, so we have a bit of a mystery here. It could be
that she is Laura de Noves, who would have been born in 1310, but unfortunately was already
married by the time Petrarch meets her. So if it's that
Laura, then his love is never going to be requited. That means it's never going to be
returned, and he'll have to love from afar. We're not even sure that he ever even talked
to her, but he certainly fell in love with her, and he would
go on to write hundreds of poems to her, which in years to come would be shared, as people
took them around the world. They were translated into
every known language of the time. They became very popular. One of the reasons for this
popularity is probably that everyone can related to love at first sight. Laura is 17 when she
meets Petrarch, or she sees him, or really he sees
her, at mass when they're at church. And here's the actual remains of the church today, in
Avignon, which is again in France. Some nice Gothic
architecture there. And here is another portrait of Laura, and more remains of the church there,
and the little plaque that announces in French, that this is the place where Laura and Petrarch
met. It even talks about their immortal love, and it's immortal because the sonnets have
preserved their love forever.
Here we see the building as it is today. It's a theater, and you can still see some of the
archways and windows that look kind of church-like, but it is now in use as a performance base.
So the drama of great love can continue on stage.
Petrarch eventually writes 366 poems about Laura. 317 of them being sonnets. Now he collects
them all together, and he calls the group "Canzoniere," which means songs, like "cancion,"
in Spanish means song. Critic Stanley Martin writes that
Petrarch reimagined the conventions of love poetry in the most profound way: Love for
the idealized lady was the path towards learning how to
properly love God. Notice how in this painting we see Laura appearing before Petrarch almost
like an angel, and of course we have Cupid as well, about to shoot him with an arrow
of love, but the attitude he has toward her is quite reverent,
is worshipful, and it's through loving a woman that a man can purify his soul and discover
divine love. Here we see Petrarch depicted with a portrait
of Laura, which is on the right. With a pen in his hand, he reclines, leaning back toward
her, looking to her for inspiration. He also seems to be in attitude of ecstasy, hoping
that looking at her will inspire a new poem. Now Petrarch
wrote a sonnet that captures the moment when he first met Laura. He talks about how there
was an eclipse that day, and then goes on to say how love
attacked him, but he did not defend himself. "It was on that day when the sun's ray / was
darkened in pity for its Maker, / that I was captured, and did not defend myself, / because
your lovely eyes had bound me, Lady. / It did not seem
to me to be a time to guard myself / against Love's blows: so I went on / confident,
unsuspecting; from that, my troubles / started, amongst the public
sorrows. / Love discovered me all weaponless, / and opened the way to the heart through
the eyes, / which are made the passageways and doors of tears: / so that it seems to
me it does him little honour / to wound me with his arrow, in that
state, / he not showing his bow at all to you who are armed." So he's referring to Cupid
here, who is able to wound Petrarch with his arrow, but
Laura is not going to be hurt by the arrow, because she is armed. There's some kind of
defense that she has against this love and this arrow of Cupid. But he's weaponless,
and his eyes are the way that the love has managed to enter, because
he sees her, and is so struck and moved by her that he does indeed fall in love. Now
let's get ready to look at the structure of this poem. You
notice how it has a stanza of four lines, and then another four lines, and then we have
two sets of three. So basically, we have a set of eight and a set of six, and this is
typical for what's now called the Petrarchan sonnet. So we have
in most Petrarchan sonnets that octave, which is the set of eight lines, and then a sestet,
which is the set of six lines. Now remember your root
words, and you know that "oct" means eight and "ses" means six. There's also a rhyme
pattern: A B B A A B B A, in the octave. So that means we might have something like nation,
fair, care, station, for the first set, and the same sounds
again for the second set. For the sestet we move into some new sounds, and we label those
C, D, the C sound, the D sound. And there'll be an
alternating of C D C D. Or even a fifth sound might come in: C D E C D E. In any case, we
have 14 lines total, and there's a turn at the ninth line. So after the octave, we get
what's called a volta, which is a shift in the poem, and
this is usually the point where the poet starts to really make an interesting point. The whole
thing will be in a particular rhythm. It's called
iambic pentameter, which means it's in a rhythm that goes like this: da DA da DA da DA da
DA da DA. So let's look at another example. This is sonnet 292. You can see the purple
part is the octave, the brown is the sestet, and the volta
is marked with the brown arrow. I'll just read it. "The eyes I spoke of once in words
that burn, / the arms and hands and feet and lovely face
/ that took me from myself for such a space / of time and marked me out from other men;
/ the waving hair of unmixed gold that shone, / the smile that flashed with the angelic
rays / that used to make this earth a paradise, / are now a
little dust, all feeling gone; / and yet..." Now this is the volta, right? Because "yet"
always signals a change. Everything that has come before has
described the beautiful lover. However, she's died, because all of her hair and eyes and
so on are now dust, and the feeling from them is gone. So the lover has died, and yet he
remains. So the sestet it going to talk about that: "and yet
I live, grief and disdain to me, / left where the light I cherished never shows, / in fragile
bark on the tempestuous sea. / Here let my loving song
come to a close; / the vein of my accustomed art is dry, / and this, my lyre, turned at
last to tears." This is so sad. He compares himself to a bark, which is a boat, on a stormy
sea. He says my loving song, the poem, is going to have
to come to a close, because the inspiration for it, this vein, is now dry. And this, my
lyre, meaning poetry itself, and poem-writing, has turned to
tears. Now let's take a closer look at the rhythm that Petrarch uses. It's called iambic
pentameter. Don't let the word scare you. "Penta" means five, so you have five of something.
"Meter" means rhythm. It just means we have a rhythm
that has five of something, and what the something is is iams. So one iam would be a da-DA, and
five of them go, duh-DUM duh-DUM duh-DUM duh-DUM duh-DUM. We have an unstressed syllable followed
by a stressed one. "Until I finish this I'll stay awake." There's an example. Let's feel
it in our bodies by using a snap clap five times. So
it goes like this: Snap clap snap clap snap clap snap clap snap clap. "Until I finish
this I'll stay awake." That'll help you feel the rhythm physically. And then you can sense
it in the poem, as you read it. Now let's take a look at some
conventions. That means some typical themes that Petrarch uses in his poems, and then
afterwards, everybody else uses in their sonnets too. Courtly
love for an unattainable lady is common in many sonnets, in particular Petrarch. Love
is horribly painful. The angelic lady is cruel in rejecting the poet's love. Love is a religion
who's practice egnobles the lover. Love at first
sight appears in many sonnets. Christian and Classical, which means Greek, imagery coexist.
We have both references to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as
well as Hera or Aphrodite. Cupid is cruel and powerful. The poet is at war with himself,
and has internal struggles. These are typical of Petrarch's sonnets, and later sonnet-writers,
sonneteers, will use the sonnet to explore those same
themes even as they use different words.
Eventually, Laura dies, and Petrarch writes on a fly-leaf of a favorite book, which is
written by Virgil, he says, "Laura, who was distinguished by her own virtues, and widely
celebrated by my songs, first appeared to my eyes in my early
manhood, in the year of our Lord 1327, upon the sixth day of April, at first hour, in
the Church of Santa Clara, Avignon." So that's when he saw her
for the first time. In the same city, on the same month of April, on the same sixth day,
at the same first hour, in the year 1348, that light was taken from our day, while I
was by chance in Verona, ignorant, alas! of my fate." So when
he says, "that light was taken" he means that Laura was taken. And he happened to be in
Verona, which is where Shakespeare chose to set Romeo and
Juliet, where it takes place. So that's kind of interesting. Poor Petrarch.
Now the question of who Petrarch's Laura really was continues unanswered to this day. It might
have been Laura de Noves, but we're not entirely sure. Trying to answer this question, her
tomb was dug up, and when it was opened, they discovered
a lead box inside. In the lead box was a medal that represented a woman ripping at her heart,
and under the medal was a sonnet by Petrarch. That seems pretty conclusive, but we have
to remember that Petrarch's sonnets were circulated widely, and this Laura may have simply thought
it was charming that Petrarch was writing to some
other Laura, and it was just a coincidence. Either way, Laura was certianly an inspiration
for Petrarch.
Even after Laura's death, Petrarch continued to work on sonnets in her honor, writing 103
new sonnets. And then, in 1341, while he's still in his 30s, remember, Petrarch is crowned
poet laureate of Rome. Apparently Paris offered
to crown him their poet laureate as well, since he spent lots of time in France, but
he decided that Rome was more proper, since he was born an Italian.
Besides sonnets, he writes hundreds of letters that he collects into books. He also writes
books on faith, including conversations with a character that he names "Truth," and also
he puts himself in conversation with saints, so old, dead
saints. He decides to write to them and invent their replies. Then he writes longer poems
and meditations on humans reaching their potential. He does
this because he's quite interested in the Greek and Roman writers, in humans developing
their skills in logic, in creativity, and he brings all of this into his contemporary
time, which is the Renaissance. The Renaissance is about to happen,
and he's one of the people who brings alive these older Greek and Roman texts. Here we
see Petrarch's handwriting. He's writing with a quill, and
he's working on describing the life of one of the Classical authors, Scipio. Here's a
book page from an edition of Petrarch's work, published in 1470. You can see how these pages
are illuminated. They have all those colors and decorations
on them. On July 19, 1374, right before he turns 70 years old, Petrarch is found dead
by his daughter Francesca. He's slumped over his desk, working
on another great piece of writing. Here's his tomb in Arqua Petrarca. The town originally
did not have his name at the end of it, but they added it on. I should mention that he
had this daughter, Francesca, out of wedlock, because, as a man
of the church, he was not allowed to marry. But he apparently had at least two children,
perhaps by the same mother, perhaps not. But his daughter did
find him when he died. Here is the village of Arqua Petrarca, and his house. You can
see where in Italy it is, kind of near Venice in northern Italy. Petrarch influenced countless
writers of his own time, including his friend Boccaccio,
who wrote the famous DECAMERON. It's a frame tale, which means it has stories inside of
stories. Petrarch's style inspires poets throughout the
Renaissance. His use of enjambment, which means continuing the sense of a sentence beyond
the line break... And of course the sonnet itself... His humanist thinking ends the dark
ages. Because he studies the Greek and Roman authors, and
revives interest in them, he's credited with starting the Renaissance, meaning starting
interest in those works, and the scholarship around those
works. Shakespeare reads him 200 years later, and writes many many sonnets as well.
In later years, the English writers bring the sonnet to England, and simplify the rhyme,
because English doesn't have a lot of rhyming words the way other Latin-based languages
do. Shakespeare writes his 156 sonnet sequence in the 1590s,
but he also brings sonnets into his plays. Let's take a look at one that's hidden inside
of Romeo and Juliet. Notice how Romeo is able to convince
Juliet to kiss him with his clever word-play, and also notice how this is a 14-line sonnet,
even though each character takes some lines, and then hands it off to the other. "If I
profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine, the
gentle fine is this: / My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand / To smooth that rough
touch with a tender kiss." So he's saying, if my hand is
doing you some dishonor by touching it, well then, my lips could just come in and fix that,
you know. With that rough touch, I could just tenderly smooth that over with my lips. Juliet
says, "Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too
much, / Which mannerly devotion shows in this; / For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands
do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss." So she
says, your hand isn't doing anything bad. Don't wrong it. Don't insult your hand. Saints
have hands, and praying is something that we do with our hands. Romeo says, "Have not
saints lips, and holy palmers too?" And she says, "Ay, pilgrim,
lips that they must use in prayer." So you see how she's pushing him back. And then he
says, "O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; /
Then pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair." So he wants to lips to touch the
same way that hands touch in prayer. She says, "Saints do not move, though grant for prayers'
sake." "Then move not," says Romeo, "while my prayer's
effect I take." So you see, he's saying she is a saint, and she says, saints don't move.
He says, okay then, don't move, and I'll just come to you.
Right? "The prayer's effect I take." He moves to kiss her. Very clever. Now notice that
Shakespeare's using all the sonnet tricks: iambic pentameter, rhythm, and rhyme. He's
not the only one using the sonnet form. There's John Milton;
John Dun, with his holy sonnets; John Keats in the 1800s; and, moving into the 20th century,
Robert Frost; Edna St. Vincent Millay; and many others.
There's a famous modern sonnet by Billy Collins that makes fun of Petrarch, in fact. I believe
it's just called "Sonnet." You can check it out online. Let's look at one final sonnet.
This is by John Keats. He lived around 1800. This is
"Bright Star." "Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art / Not in lone splendour
hung aloft the night / And watching, with eternal lids apart,
/ Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, / The moving waters at their priestlike task
/ Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, / Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask / Of
snow upon the mountains and the moors / No, yet still
stedfast, still unchangeable, / Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, / To feel
for ever its soft fall and swell, / Awake for ever in a sweet
unrest, / Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever or else swoon
to death."
Now this is another love sonnet. It is in that tradition of Petrarch, because of it's
subject matter. But notice how it's divided into three sets of four lines each? Those
are quatrains, like the word "quarter." Quatrain there in blue, quatrain
in purple, quatrain in red, and those last two lines that rhyme with each other, that
is a couplet. And it's Shakespeare who brings the sonnet
into this particular form. This is called a Shakespearean sonnet, whereas the other
version is the Petrarchan, naturally. Both have the iambic pentameter, both have a strict
rhyme scheme, and both are usually dealing with love and similar
topics, those Petrachan conventions that I listed. If you're wondering what this poem
is about, the star is a distant observer, while the poet
wants to be up close to the lover, and lay his head on her chest, and that sort of thing.
He wants to as faithful as a star is, but closer and more intimate with his love. In
fact, he says, if he can't live like that, then he would rather
swoon in death. Very romantic. Thank you for Frank, Francesco Petrarch, for bringing us
the sonnet, and also for letting love inspire you to write
such wonderful poems.
I hope you'll join me for another video sometime.