The Labyrinth as Style in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Abstract

An image of poetic skill and of the circuitous rhetoric of selfdelusion in Petrarch's Rime sparse, a monument to craftsmanship that befuddled Daedalus, its architect, in book 8 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the labyrinth symbolized both conscious craft and perplexity during the Renaissance. Lady Mary Wroth's 1621 sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, alludes to these contexts with the opening of the corona that crowns the sequence: In strang labourinth how shall I turne?1 The temporal and spatial vagaries of this and the punning labour of Wroth's spelling evoke the poem itself as intricate space and Pamphilia's thought as labyrinthine source of mimetic writing.2 Like the mazes of classical literature, architecture, and art familiar to Renaissance readers of Pliny, Ovid, and Virgil, Wroth's artifact represents perplexity even as it perplexes. Wroth achieves effect through syntax and poetic forms that mime two physical traits of labyrinths: enclosure and complexity. The labyrinth and the sonnet are coupled fittingly to these ends. Like mazes in classical literature, the sonnet is identified through metapoetic tropes in English as enclosed space and highly crafted formas John Donne's We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms, and well-wrought urn testify.3 Wroth magnifies the confines of the sonnet through contracted syntax that elides articles and pronouns and creates ambiguous referents, suggesting the troublesome fit of meaning to poetic form. Such tricky syntax mimics Mary Moore explores other elements of Wroth's and other women's love sonnet sequences in her forthcoming book, Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism. Her book-length poetry collection, T'he Book of Snow, is due out in early 1998.