The sonnet is an interesting poetic form. It is from the genre of poetry. It is a subgenre, the sonnet. And as we'll see in these following series of discussions, there are many forms of the sonnet that have changed over time. Every poet who has written a sonnet has at some point in their career read other sonnetss and made illusions to them. So in addition to being a very interesting area of study for genre and form, it's also a very compelling area of interest for uh interextuality. So let's um go on to the next slide here. Generically speaking, at least in the early days, we can say that the form of the sonnet is 14 lines of poetry with a particular set rhyme. The changes in that rhyme are part of the changes in its form. Usually written in amic pentameter, so an unstressed and the stressed and five of those per line. The Italian and French sonnetss that came to England from the European mainland are a little more unusual. The Italians are 11 syllables per line. The French 12 per line. That's called an an Alexandrian. And uh soneta comes from the Italian meaning a little song. So they were meant to be sung. This means that there is a particular rhythmic regularity to the poetry because anytime you set lyrics to music, the music remains the same all the time and therefore the meter has to be the same to match the music. Sonnetss were very much about courtly love. It was both a historically real phenomenon and a literary trope or a customary concept that made its way into many of the sonnetss. The background behind courtly love is pretty simple. In those days, arranged marriages were very common. And it was not unusual for a young girl, 11, 12, 13 years old, to be married to an older man, maybe 40 years old or somewhere around there. It doesn't take a genius to see that that pairing up of couples would be destined for disaster. Young women and girls did not get the emotional companionship, the sexual satisfaction that they needed from their marriage and would often turn to adultery as a way to get what they needed. Basically in the convention of courtly love especially in the literary tradition the poet approaches a married woman who is interested in him but usually by convention not interested enough to do anything about it. This particular situation sets up a context in which the poet has to use his words, that is to say, the power of his poetry to persuade his mistress to give him what she what he wants. Around that pleading, the poetry then becomes the instrument of wooing and courtship. And the success or failure of the poet depends on how clever he is, how much wit and intelligence he uses to create his metaphors, how persuasive he can be by um devices of repetition and things of that nature. And so the poet becomes a stock figure over time of a young male passionately in love that is unrequited. Unrequited means not reciprocated or returned by his mistress. And by convention, the mistress remains cool and aloof regardless of what the poet is trying to persuade her about. Okay. The early soneters up until about the mid600s, there's a line of them that's traceable. The origins come from Franchesco Petrarch. Thomas Wyatt was the first English poet to translate Petrarch into the English language and circulate his poems. And then of course Wyatt began to write his own sets as well. Edmund Spencer wrote them. Sir Philip Sydney wrote them. Shakespeare of course wrote sonnetss as well as did John Dunn. You may or may not know much about him. He was a preacher, a minister writing in the early 1600s. And some of his sonnetss are very unusual because they combine um religious themes with the sort of secular sonnet themes centered on uh desire, lust, sexual gratification, things of that nature. There is a peculiar John Dun sonnet where he asks God to rape him in order to remove his resistant will that sort of pushes back against God's intentions. And then we have John Milton, the famous John Milton who also wrote them. They continue of course beyond this right up into our present day. So in addition to individual sonnetss, many of these seteers wrote what we call cycles or sequences of sonnetss, one after the other after the other. Petrarch cycles you see there 1327. Sydney, Sir Philip Sydney wrote a series of sonnetss called Astril and Stella. Stella means star. Astro also means star and pho means to love. So star lover and star and that is the central metaphor for the whole series. Some of these sonnets sequences would go for 50 100 150 sonnetss one after the other after the other. Uh Shakespeare wrote his sonnetss we think in the late 1590s mid 1590s but they weren't published until6009. John Dunn there you see from uh published in 1633 but written much earlier and they were um clearly the visible product of youthful um lovers of young lovers. Also the sonnet cycles were great entertainment for groups of young people who would frequently sit around in the evening maybe drinking a few you know, questionable drinks, maybe some beer. Uh, and they would read them out loud to each other for entertainment. So, they were very much uh front and center as a part of the lifestyle of the youth of the 1500s, 1600s and so on and very much a part of their entertainment as well. So, here is Franchesco Petrart 1304 to 1374. Um, he writes his sonnetss to uh a woman named Laura. Um, that should be not airhaired. I may correct that. Fairhaired uh blue-eyed Laura. And so the set sequences that Petrarch writes are filled with these tropes, these metaphors where he compares parts of her physical uh anatomy to various components of nature. But Petrarch, he may not have invented the poetic form, but he certainly perfected it and popularized it. So that's why we call him the first uh modern poet in that sense. So Petrarch sonnetss work in two parts. There is an octave meaning eight. So the first part of the sonnet is um eight lines and the rhyme scheme there is called closed because you've got two B's inside the A's and the first four line quattrin is the same as the second. So abba abba and in the octave the poet or the speaker um will present a problem or a question or a difficulty and then in the cestat the following six lines which are interlocking will provide an answer or resolution to the problem or the question. So basically the structure of the sonnet form as Petrarch designed it is binary. It splits into octave and cestat. there are formal properties that change with it. So the octave is the closed rhyme and when you go to the cestat which is the solution or the answer is interlocking rhyme cde uh cde um or cdc cdc. So that is the setup for uh petriarchs sonets. Here's one example. Um those eyes which neath my passionate rapture rose. The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that airwell could my own soul from its own self beguile. And in a separate world of dreams and clothes, the hair's bright tresses full of golden glows and the soft lightning of the angelic smile that changed this earth to some celestial smile. And 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 a drift 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. So here is a sonnet about um loss and depression. I do want you to notice that I told you that the many Italian sonnetss were in 11 lines. Uh 11 syllables per line. Um this one is pretty close, but please remember that this is being translated from the Italian into the English. And so a lot of times you can't really trust the translation as an authentic representation of what Petrarch was really doing. There's the Italian. If you can read it, go ahead and read it. You'll see it's a little bit different from the English. If you can't, don't worry about it because it really doesn't matter too much for our purposes here. So, the Petrarchan tropes, the ideal feminine for Petrarch has fair skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair. We still have that um social pressure in today's age for um the sort of trophy wife, the ideal of feminine beauty. Think Marilyn Monroe. Think Christina Aguilera, think um so many blonde Madonna, so many blonde, fairskinned icons in our popular culture who who measure up or meet that particular standard. Um the poet's power then, as I said, is to woo his um intended mistress and to be clever. And in so doing, the poetry also offers some consolation to the poet. So here are the sort of common tropes that appear not just in Petrarch but in many of the sonnetss that make their way into English. Usually at some point the poet/narrator soneter will liken his mistress's blonde hair to gold or to sunshine. It won't be a simile. It'll be a metaphor. Then white skin to ivory or alabaster. Uh, blushing cheeks to damasked roses, which means red and white together. Blue eyes to heavenly skies. The poet's size to winds and tears to floods. Those last two winds, rain and floods are pathetic fallacy, but they're also hyperbole because they are intended to exaggerate and rather than um than uh than to be taken literally. But those are the kinds of conventions you can find in sonnets over time. What happens as new poets begin to manipulate the form is that some of these metaphors disappear or get modified. It's one way for them to engage another sonnet intertextually or to modify uh the form of a new kind of poet by changing these things. One of the things I'm going to show you is that Shakespeare writes a poem to his dark lady and she is the exact opposite of all of these Petrarchan conventions of beauty. She has dark hair, dark skin, um dark eyes, and he Shakespeare deliberately and playfully writes a sonnet that is anti-etran. We'll see that when I come down to analyzing the sonnetss later on. So, here's Sir Thomas Wyatt. Uh we see um he was a lover of Anne Berlin before she married Henry VIII. He uh was the first, as I said, to translate into English. He took the subject matter from Petrarch but modified the rhyme scheme and meter a bit. Um, Wikipedia says that Wyatt wrote 31 noteworthy sonnetss in English. That doesn't mean that's all he wrote. A lot of them were pretty bad and pretty experimental. Uh, but some of them were translations and some of them written the Petrarchan form. But one thing that Wyatt did from time to time is instead of in the cestat instead of going CDC or D um he would add a couplet at the end. So when you instead of 8 and six you would basically have 12 and two and he didn't do it often but he introduced it as an idea into uh English um sonetering. And here's um Wyatt's poem here. I'm not going to um to uh read the whole thing through, but do be aware you see the last two lines, time and climb. That's the couplet at the end, and that's one of the things that he contributed to the interextuality and to the development of the sonnet form uh over time. This is Edmund Spencer um attended Cambridge University, well educated, greatest work is the fairy queen. If you don't know it, you should read it. It's the one of the definitive arththerian legends um written in very very controlled and disciplined poetry. Um the spenserian sonnet has three quattrains. So three stanzas of four and then a couplet. So he basically makes explicit what Wyatt only tinkered around with. William Shakespeare of course wrote many poems. two of the most noteworthy Venus and Adonis about Venus's seduction of a young man who resists the um advances of the goddess of love and the rape of Lucric which is a long long poem about a Roman uh princess who is raped by a man named Tarwin the proud and um she ends up taking her own life at the end of it when she realizes that um her value to Roman woman's society uh has been seriously diminished. Um at least in the eyes of the society. I'm not saying that she was diminished. Uh so here's the Shakespearean form. Three quattrains interlocking GG at the end. The um notice that in Shakespeare's quatrains each rhyme scheme is different. In some of the earlier ones, uh you will see that the um the same rhyme goes through all all three quattrains, but Shakespeare plays with the form and makes each quattrain a different end rhyme. This is a very famous one. So you see minds and love, which is AB, finds and remove, which is AB again. And by the way, this is something you're going to have to watch for. Um in our modern pronunciation love and remove don't rhyme but in Shakespeare's day we know they did it was lova and raova and so um this is one of these rhyme schemes are one of the ways in which we moderns have learned how they pronounced words back in Shakespeare's day and you see the couplet at the end proved and loded so this is the Shakespeareans on When you compare them all, this is the rhyme scheme compared between each different type. So the Petrarchan abba, abba, that's the octave. The Spencerian and the Shakespearean are pretty close. They're remarkably different because they don't have an octave. Um they have 12 lines with a couplet at the end. However, there's a lot of formal differences between Spencer and Shakespeare. So, you can see after the first stanza, uh, Shakes Spencerians are abab that's interlocking. Shakespeare ab that's also interlocking. But then in the Spencerian, the second stanza loops back to the last um rhyme at the end of the line above at line four. So you end up in the sha the Spencerian with a couplet here and another couplet here around the C's um and the B's. You don't get that in the Shakespearean. They go AB A B C D C D E F E F followed by the couplet. So these minor uh tinkerings with form especially end rhyme are ways in which soneters acknowledged each other's work a sort of intertextuality but also were ways in which they began to modify the subgenre of the sonnet by tinkering with its form. That's it for sonnets.