Sonnet Form Research Articles

A Queen in a “Purple Robe”: Henry Constable’s Poetic Tribute to Mary, Queen of Scots

The religious sonnets that the Elizabethan poet and courtier Henry Constable wrote in exile, which reveal strong post-Tridentine and continental influences, have been edited and assessed as they survive in manuscript in the British Library (Harley MS 7553)> thought to be the only witness. The rediscovery of another manuscript containing the Spiritual Sonnets, held at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, throws light on the hitherto obscure history of their production and reception. It also adds four new sonnets to the canon of Constable's poetry, three of which are addressed to Mary, Queen of Scots. This article looks at the rediscovered sonnets as pieces that fit in larger martyrological narrative constructed around the figure of the executed queen; in addition, it brings to the fore Constable's personal anxieties as an exiled Englishman who hoped to return home under the rule of more tolerant king. ********** THE Elizabethan poet Henry Constable (1562-1613) is best known for his secular sonnets, which found their way into different manuscript miscellanies and two printed editions and earned him considerable reputation among his contemporaries. (1) In 1621 he was described by Edmund Bolton as a great Master in English Tongue whose Delivery of Conceit was unparalleled. (2) However, his literary prestige suffered on account of his religion. Later critics and scholars considered Constable traitor of sorts based on Thomas Birch's portrayal of the poet as zealous Roman Catholic, which became critical commonplace and influenced the reception of his works from the early eighteenth century on. (3) Thomas Park, the first modern editor of Constable, printed not only the secular sonnets but also later group of works that had gone largely unnoticed and became known as the Spiritual Sonnets. (4) The shift from amatory and courtly sonnets to Catholic ones revealing strong post-Tridentine influences is consistent with the evolution of man who started out as steadfast Protestant with promising career as diplomat and converted to the Roman church around 1590. (5) In i960, Joan Grundy included these later sonnets in her book The Poems of Henry Constable, using as her copy-text the only manuscript known to that date, BL Harley MS 7553 (henceforth HA), miscellaneous volume whose provenance remains obscure. (6) In the last few decades, as result of the turn to religion in early modern English studies, Constable's Spiritual Sonnets have been reassessed by scholars interested in the poetry written by converts as illustrating the way in which the sonnet form was adapted to religious concerns. (7) The rediscovery of another manuscript containing the Spiritual Sonnets, held at Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, under the call mark Select Books 85 (henceforth BE), throws new light on the hitherto obscure history of production and reception of these sonnets. Besides presenting more complex arrangement of the sequence and number of textual variants, BE adds four new sonnets to the canon of Constable's poetry, three of which are addressed to Mary, Queen of Scots. (8) These raise questions concerning the poet's embrace of the Catholic martyrological tradition, his rejection of Queen Elizabeth as sovereign, and the extent of his renunciation of worldly concerns as he sought to reingratiate himself with Mary's son, the heir presumptive to the throne. They embody narrative shift in collection that, in the better-known Harley manuscript, is concerned exclusively with doctrinal and devotional matters and offers but fragmented view of Constable's experience as an exiled convert who longed to be welcomed back home. (9) A close reading of Constable's Spiritual Sonnets as the carefully crafted sequence surviving in BE provides better understanding of the situation of people tom between their newfound faith and service to their country and underscores Michael Questier's notion of loyalism as myth, that is, constraining belief that Catholic converts were either traitors or patriots. …

Evolution and the Struggle of Love in Emily Pfeiffer’s Sonnets

Mrs. Pfeiffer's most abiding reputation will rest upon her sonnets, and of these best deal with two great questions of day--evolution and sphere, wrote Eric Robertson in his headnote to six Pfeiffer poems he selected for English Poetesses: A Series of Critical Biographies, with Illustrative Extracts (1883). (1) Robertson's second center of interest, woman's sphere, has found traction in emerging scholarship on Pfeiffer's poetry--a scholarship not birthed till mid-1990s and growing but slowly, despite a nineteenth-century regard for Pfeiffer that led Robertson to group her in a chapter with Christina Rossetti, Augusta Webster, and Mathilde Blind. Questions of gender typically anchor modern editorial introductions or headnotes on Pfeiffer, and gender also informs studies of Pfeiffer's prose travel writing, Hellenism, and Welsh nationalism. (2) In contrast, despite expanding scholarly conversation on nineteenth-century poetry and evolutionary theory, Pfeiffer's poetry on this subject has been little discussed. For instance, in Darwin's Bards: British and American Poetry in Age of Evolution, John Holmes studies numerous major and minor poets who grapple with competing Darwinian and non-Darwinian evolutionary theories but does not mention Pfeiffer, though he considers Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden, and Agnes Mary Robinson alongside an array of male poets. Fabienne Moine's recent Women Poets in Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry helpfully brings multiple women poets with evolutionary interests into view; but her expansive coverage requires Moine to consider Pfeiffer in under two pages. (3) Yet Pfeiffer's sonnets merit more sustained attention for their vigorous critique of Darwinism within a general assent to evolutionary theory. In present article, therefore, I revise and extend emerging interpretations of Pfeiffer's evolutionary thought. Pfeiffer (1827-1890) was well read on this and other subjects: though not formally schooled, she maximized opportunity to study and write afforded her by her 1850 marriage to Jurgen Edward Pfeiffer, a wealthy and supportive German merchant in London; having no children, she could devote time to literary endeavors. She and her husband frequented literary circles and corresponded with British and American editors such as Theodore Watts-Dunton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Horace Elisha Scudder. Pfeiffer published her first serious volume of poetry seven years after her marriage, followed by more than a dozen poetry collections and periodical essays--on women's education, women's suffrage, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Pre-Raphaelite poet--before her death in 1890 (Hickok, Emily Pfeiffer; Hickok, Why?, p. 374; Brown et al.). To my mind as well as to many of her contemporary reviewers, Pfeiffer's sonnets form her best work. Pfeiffer herself seemed compelled by form: she wrote more than ninety sonnets between 1873 and 1889, ones most invested in evolutionary thought by 1880. Her sonnets frequently blend Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms, perhaps implying she viewed sonnet form as equally in flux with her evolutionary subject. (4) In any case, her sonnets mostly precede now more recognized nineteenth-century poems on subject of evolution such as George Meredith's nature poems (1880s); Naden's Evolutional Erotics (1887); Blind's A scent of Man (1889); and Tennyson's By an Evolutionist and The Making of Man, among others (1889 and 1892, respectively). As I shall demonstrate, poet-speaker of Pfeiffer's sonnets emerges in a position unique among these close contemporaries: she accepts Darwinian evolution as true but regards it as an enemy whose savagery must be resisted through a moral force called Love. This claim differs from brief readings put forward by Kathleen Hickok, Trenton B. Olsen, Fabienne Moine, and Virginia Blain. Hickok interprets one of Pfeiffer's most anthologized poems, The Chrysalis, as a religious poem whose phrase the Love that saves! …

“Patterns of Thought and Feeling” in Herbert’s Easter Poems

“Patterns of Thought and Feeling” in Herbert’s Easter Poems Chauncey Wood In John Drury’s biography of George Herbert he describes his interpretive strategy in terms of his subject’s inward and outward worlds: The circumstances of a poet’s life and times are the soil in which the work is rooted – not just the outward and material circumstances but also, and still more, the inward patterns of thought and feeling prevailing in the poet’s world. (emphasis added)1 This essay proposes a reading of Herbert’s Easter poems that will emphasize Herbert’s relationship with other contemporary poets; the ways in which his Easter poems reflect his consciousness both of what he picks up from these other poets, and what he gives back. While Herbert undoubtedly hoped his poems would reach a wider audience, nevertheless it is illuminating to look closely at both his awareness and appreciation of the fashionable poetic activity of his day. “The poet’s world,” for Herbert, was both spiritual and secular; both rooted in faith yet responsive to poetic fashion. In 1609/10, when the youthful George Herbert wrote his New Year’s Day sonnets to his mother, he made use of the fashionable, secular sonnet form to turn that form against its fashion. Using the sonnet form to argue against its widespread usage for romantic love poems is an unmistakable gesture, turning his opponents’ poetic strength against them, which is part of Herbert’s assertiveness about his purpose: to turn poetry in praise of earthly matters into poetry in praise of things divine. When his speaker asks God “Why are not Sonnets made of thee? And layes / Upon thine altar burnt?” (ll. 5-6).2 Herbert embeds the question [End Page 135] in a sonnet addressed to God – the very kind of poem the absence of which he bemoans. By so doing he metaphorically lays his own poem on God’s altar, thereby accomplishing what he announced should be accomplished. It is all quite effective and admirably witty. The sixteen-year old boy at once announces and demonstrates his intention to write poetry about God’s love, not human love, and does so in two quite competent sonnets. While the sentiment was scarcely new, the young man’s expression of it not only declared his position to his mother, but may have been intended to establish his poetic coming of age to his family, their friends, and perhaps to a wider literary circle. Even in that age of precocious literary development these poems are quite remarkable. Herbert set out to use this fashionable secular poetic form for what he here alleges are less fashionable divine subjects, and he goes on to pursue and to widen this goal in full measure throughout his life. In The Temple Herbert more than fulfills his promise to transform the popular love sonnet into sonnets with a divine orientation; there are fifteen of them in The Temple. Cristina Malcolmson has noted that Herbert’s New Year’s Day sonnets were written immediately after the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets in 1609, and she shrewdly observes that the young Herbert was also very much aware of the sonnets of his kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney. Even more importantly she follows up Arthur Marotti’s characterization of John Donne as a coterie poet to emphasize that Herbert, too, wrote with a coterie group very much on his mind. In George Herbert: A Literary Life she devotes the entire first chapter to “The Sidney-Herbert Coterie” – a coterie that of course included John Donne.3 When Herbert writes he may not write directly to a coterie, but he is very much aware who some of his readers will be, and he is equally aware of what those readers have been writing. Before attempting an analysis of Herbert’s Easter poems we may profitably study some of the kinds of things the mature Herbert does with the conventional love sonnet in order to prepare for his dealing with other fashionable poetic forms and practices. The first sonnet in The Temple is “The Sinner,” in which Herbert upends several commonplaces of the love sonnet in order to change the commonplace Lover of...

The Transformative Poetics of Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets

This article examines the recurring formal traits, themes, and political concerns motivating Wanda Coleman’s 100-poem American Sonnets sequence. I argue that through her transformations of the sonnet form and her attention to current social issues, Coleman helps to define a new movement in experimental black poetics. Her work responds directly to poetic predecessors and contemporary writers while amassing a wide range of compositional strategies that both acknowledge her roots in the Black Arts Movement and mark out new creative ground.

A mão e a luva: a respeito de um soneto escrito por Jorge de Lima

resumo Análise de poema contido no Livro de sonetos, publicado em 1949, por Jorge de Lima. Partindo de uma "leitura rente ao texto", a reflexão chega à prática comparativa, confrontando o poema a uma passagem do romance A mulher obscura, de 1939. Por último, há o enfoque do amor contido nos dois textos. Destacam-se o amor pela forma do soneto e o amor pela "mulher que se entrega à morte", imagem que, portando rastros de tendências finisseculares, adquire marcas impressas pelo autor alagoano.

Queering Sonnets: Sexuality and Transnational Identity in the Poetry of Patience Agbabi

The emergence of queer diaspora studies has demanded increasing attention to the ways in which women writers have challenged the heterocentrism of dominant conceptions of diaspora. The theoretical intersection of queer studies with diaspora and black studies in relatively recent years has produced a vital reassessment of the black studies project. In the attempt to reconceptualize black queer and black diaspora, Rinaldo Walcott, in particular, has stressed the importance of a broader geographical and comparative framework, and offered crucial insights into the spatial redefinition of queer studies. Walcott's new black queer theory provides a particularly useful framework in this article to analyse the poetic work of Patience Agbabi in Transformatrix (2000) and Bloodshot Monochrome (2008) as queer poetic praxis. A British poet of Nigerian ancestry, Agbabi combines her experience as a spoken-word artist and performer with her literary background as an Oxford-educated poet. Straddling the British lyric tradition and performance poetry, her work explores the sonnet form while revealing the complexities of gender and sexuality. This article agues that, as she steps beyond safe boundaries of literary conventions in a creative interplay of formal constraint and experimentation, Agbabi queers the sonnet form, destabilizing normative gay, lesbian, black, men's and women's identities.

All of You on the Good Earth by Ernest Hilbert (review)

Reviewed by: All of You on the Good Earth by Ernest Hilbert Chris Childers (bio) Ernest Hilbert, All of You on the Good Earth (Red Hen Press, 2013), 96 pp. “A moment’s monument”—so Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the sonnet. But is “monument” quite right? From a certain angle it seems rigid and a bit grandiose, not unlike the boast of Ozymandias. There is, however, another kind of sonnet, looser and livelier, that lives in the same way moments do, vibrating with indeterminacy. It offers a glimpse as through a closing door or from a speeding car, a flash above a darkened landscape, an echo that [End Page 448] redoubles as it fades. It is messy and moving, charged equally with chaos and insight. It is alive. That’s the kind of sonnet written by Ernest Hilbert, sonneteer for people who don’t like sonnets. His most recent book, 2013’s All of You on the Good Earth, published by Red Hen Press, is, like his 2009 effort, Sixty Sonnets (also from Red Hen), a collection of sixty sonnets—really, fifty-nine, if we discount the one twelve-line poem, “Past Present Future.” In one of these sixty, titled only with the mathematical symbol ∞, Hilbert eyes Rossetti. The poet sees a rubber band in the gutter, folded like a Möbius strip into the symbol for infinity. The poem concludes: Could I believe,Unstretched from its cargo, this helixed formHas a cosmos obscured in its curvature?Is it merely what I see in the moment?When I walk away, will it keep what it meant? Blake saw “the world in a grain of sand, eternity in a wildflower”; Hilbert sees it in a gutter. But the vision isn’t enough. It has a meaning for a particular person at a particular time; the sonnet is Hilbert’s attempt to preserve that moment and meaning. But not even they can be fixed: after the poet publishes his poem and walks away, who’s to say it will mean for others what it did for him? We, the poet’s readers—his confidantes and co-conspirators, well-wishers and rivals, admirers and ignorers, in short, all of us on the good earth—we are the quantum indeterminacy, the flux in his capacitor, monkey wrenches in the meaning machine, instruments of alienation and salvation, co-passengers, co-sufferers, the far-flung, multifarious cogs to whom he would speak and connect, for whom his heart is full. Likewise, the poems in AOYOTGE chart their horizons in a sonnet form flexible and capacious enough to accommodate the wide range and varieties of experience to which they and we are bound. What makes the “Hilbertian” sonnet capacious? First, the much-discussed rhyme scheme, shared by most of the poems in the volume (fifty-four out of sixty, to be precise), consisting of two sestets followed by a couplet: abcabcdefdefgg. The structural units of Hilbert’s sonnets fall outside the usual parameters of octave-sestet, or (that Steve Guttenberg film a few of us are still waiting for) Three Quatrains and a Couplet, allowing Hilbert to put the conventional volta (or turn) anywhere or nowhere. The effect is to de-formulaicize and de-familiarize the sonnet’s traditional rhetorical shape, shifting the weight of emphasis off of argument and onto imagery and voice, an effect to which the distant mutedness of the rhymes also contributes. I’ll illustrate with one poem in full, the book’s last as it happens, called “The Wife of the Zeppelin Scientist”: [End Page 449] Cold rhythm of rivets in the hangar—The balmy whirr of huge engines soothes you.Watch the glide of swelled bellies far above.To raise an ill nation from its languor,You bred giants, impractical and new.Slow, broad contours inspired a strange love.I’m not jealous. How could I be? The prowOf your dream breaks through lightning-veined storms, throwsThe past off—gleaming vanguard, Olympic.But thoughts of war must be put off for now.You grant us great, luxury torpedoes,Aimed for America over the Atlantic.Beneath, the ocean rolls out into the dark.Steel ribs plunge through clouds, sizzling...

Observe the Delightful Arrangements

Observe the Delightful Arrangements Steven Wingate (bio) Nick Montfort Counterpath Press www.counterpathpress.org 160 Pages; Print, $21.00 The “Machine Writing” focus of ABR’s January/February 2014 issue (Volume 35, Number 2) introduced many of the journal’s readers to computational modes of literature. Nick Montfort’s #! (pronounced “shebang”) furthers public conversation about machine writing by shifting the question away from the introductory and abstract (“why should we teach machines how to write poems?”) to the specific and practical (“what kinds of poems can we teach machines to write?”) In this book, he invites the reader not merely to experience computational poetry, but also to look under the hood and see how the form works. Montfort, who teaches in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program at MIT, accomplishes this invitation through an act of translation: #! shows the code that produces the text on the pages that face the text which it produces. The idea of translation is essential to understanding machine poetry because translation stands at the center of its production: small variations in a program’s code can yield far broader differences in an output text than a similar variation in an analog poem. There is far less difference between Whitman’s: Thou hast portray’d or hit thy theme entire: and the possible variantThou hast portray’d thy theme entire:than there is between Montfort’s:endings.insert(2, non_rhymes.sample)and the possible variant:endings.insert(2, rhymes.sample) Since the variation in Montfort’s two lines would generate entirely different kinds of stanzas. With generative poetry, changes to code are akin to an alteration in DNA that could result, as we know from our own evolution, in species as different as chimpanzees and humans. Seeing code side-by-side with the text it generates takes the reader inside the process of how language creates meaning by asking us to consider the poetry’s DNA directly. For me, the process of ingesting #! was akin to reading bilingual translations of foreign language poems. My eyes bounced back and forth repeatedly across the gutter of the book, trying to ascertain the patterns of what I saw (the generative poetry) so I could understand the tongue that it came from (the code). It reminded me of when I tried to better my German by reading Kafka in this way, or tried to explore Polish by reading Wisława Szymborska. I hunted and pecked for sense, for words and phrases and structures that I came with time to vaguely recognize, even though I didn’t understand the original. The translation/DNA metaphors help non-coders like myself explore computational writing because they allow us to increase our understanding of the relationship between code and text in stages, without giving up our lives to learn several programming languages. This is the gift that #! offers its most inquisitive readers. My own “Aha!” moment came with “Ruby Yacht,” the poem quoted in the example above, which was first published in The Ill-Tempered Rubyist (2013), a collection of poems written in the coding language Ruby. My mind ping-ponged across the gutter, eventually recognizing the code as a recipe of sorts, a set of ingredients and the instructions for combining them. The code included value categories and instructions like: a_phrasesb_phrasesrhymesnon_rhymesendings = rhymes.sample 3endings.insert(2, non_rhymes.sample)beginnings = a_phrases.sample 3beginnings.insert(2, b_phrases.sample) A form-driven poem contains similar ingredients and instructions, and discovering the rules of “Ruby Yacht” was akin to figuring out the rhyme scheme of an experimental sonnet form. It was perhaps because of this personal discovery that the earlier sections of #! intrigued me most. The operations that the programs (Ruby and Python) performed felt the most detailed and had the most bearing on nuance and meaning. The fragmented, self-rearranging “Through the Park” depicts multiple remixes of an encounter between a girl who “turns to smile and wink” and a man who “dashes, leaving pretense behind.” I latched onto the section “Concrete Perl” (written in the Perl language) less fully because the translational operations are very large scale. They felt less intricate, and I noticed fewer nuances of language...

Unsexing Petrarch: Charlotte Smith’s Lessons in the Sonnet as a Social Medium

CONSERVATIVE CLERGYMAN RICHARD POLWHELE INCLUDED CHARLOTTE Smith among Unsex'd Females in his 1798 satire of women writers, failing to notice that Smith had effectively unsex'd herself in constructing her original Petrarchan poetic identity. (1) With her first small volume of poetry titled Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays, Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park entered the English literary marketplace in 1784 as a for her era, aspiring to both the lifetime recognition and lasting fame achieved by her laureled fourteenth-century Italian predecessor. Petrarch's Rime sparse, the frequently expanded and revised sequence of sonnets and songs lamenting his failure to win reciprocal recognition from his beloved Laura, gave Smith her model for forging her own virtual community of poems and readers. Her poetic persona took shape as an unsex'd seeking an affective connection with readers through what Smith refers to in her Preface as sensibility of heart: shared feelings of isolation and frustrated desires transmitted primarily though not exclusively in sonnet form. (2) Smith acknowledges her debt to most obviously in the small sequence of three sonnets From Petrarch that appear in her first two editions of Elegiac Sonnets, but her reading and radical reenactment of the Rime sparse is deeply embedded throughout this introductory collection that established her as a popular poet. The first two editions of Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays--printed within months of each other in London and in Chichester, respectively, and containing the same nineteen poems in slightly different orders (3)--suggest that Smith's reading of imbued her with poetic ambitions as strong as those of the canonical male Romantic poets who succeeded her. Although she deviates from Petrarch's sonnet rhyme scheme and names no equivalent to his Laura, Smith's speaker emulates Petrarch's in giving sonnet form to the affect of alienation and in making poetry a proxy for love. The intensity of Smith's early homage to becomes diluted as Elegiac Sonnets expands through seven more editions and a second volume before her death in 1806. Readers who encounter her work in later and larger collections, including those produced in the recovery of her work since the 1990s, see as one of several male voices she assumes or echoes. Critics who recognize a feminist strain in Smith sometimes underestimate or overlook her collusion with Petrarch, who is often read as a misogynist for objectifying Laura and denying her autonomy. (4) Daniel Robinson, for example, has acknowledged that Smith's extensive poetic conversation with dominates these original editions, but he and others, including Kathryn Pratt, Karen Weisman, Theresa Kelley, and Edoardo Zuccato, read Smith as resisting or challenging the Petrarchan tradition by granting more voice or agency to Laura. (5) Smith may well have had reason to identify with Laura: Susannah Dobson's popular Life of Petrarch, published in 1775, presented Laura as the mother of many children who was trapped in an unhappy marriage. (6) The same profile fit Smith when she first began to publish after an early, arranged marriage, the birth of eleven children in eighteen years, and time spent in debtors' prison with her problematic husband. (7) However, Smith had stronger motivation to identify with Petrarch's speaker, who paradoxically proclaimed his agency impaired by Laura's repeated refusals to acknowledge him with love or pity. Smith's agency was restricted by the social and legal structures of her place and time that left her [s] tripped by marriage of a separate identity and autonomous property. (8) In the 1784 editions of Elegiac Sonnets, Smith modeled her speaker after Petrarch's to elicit from readers an intellectual and emotional reciprocity missing from her immediate circumstances. In Smith's lifetime, and Laura had returned to British culture on a wave of French texts, creating multiple opportunities for encountering the pair as reconstructed heroes of sensibility. …

“Saved by the historic page”: Charlotte Smith’s Arun River Sonnets

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY IN CHARLOTTE SMITH'S POETRY HAS ATTRACTED much attention in recent years. With discussions usually focusing on the two mature works, The Emigrants (1793) and Beachy Head (1807), a portrait has emerged of Smith as a kind of author-historian with diverse interests in natural and political histories. Scholars of her work have yet to note the topic's significance in her earliest poetry, and no sustained analysis of its initial appearance as a subject of serious interest for Smith has been offered hitherto. Although over the course of her career she would gradually depart from the restrictive sonnet form for the freedom of blank verse in order to explore ideas of greater complexity and depth, her earliest sonnets contain the genesis of her unique melding of local history and emotional inflection that she helped popularize in loco-descriptive verse. Of primary interest are her sonnets to the Arun River. First published in the third edition of Elegiac Sonnets in 1786, they memorialize locally-born poets William Collins, William Hayley, and Thomas Otway, and demonstrate that Smith was interested both in the history of her Surrey homeland and in the poet's role as chronicler of local legends. In the absence of any existing study into how Smith presents the issue of history in these poems, a brief overview of them is organized thematically at the outset of this essay and is followed by a discussion of their engagement with various poetic traditions. In the Arun River sonnets, Smith celebrates the literary history of her surroundings at Woolbeding House, an ancient stone-built home in Sussex, near Midhurst, where she resided with her family for roughly two years. (1) She and her children moved to Woolbeding in the spring of 1785, after having spent several difficult months in Normandy in an effort to flee her insolvent husband Benjamin's creditors. (2) The series consists of four poems. Sonnets xxvi and xxxn describe the poet's perception of the ghostlike presence of Thomas Otway, who was born in nearby Milland in 1652, with his father serving as rector of Woolbeding's All Hallows Church. Sonnets XXX and XXXIII pay tribute to Sussex-born poets William Collins and William Hayley, as well as Otway, and praise the region as enchanted for poetic creation. (3) Smith describes Otway, Collins, and Hayley as poets of her own sensibility, whose presence can be felt by their present-day through the land. (4) In the four sonnets, the process by which these kindred spirits preserve the life stories of their famed ancestors, particularly Otway's, is one of Smith's primary themes. In particular, the Arun sonnets focus on the endurance and fortitude of the poets' life stories. The topic of how the past is preserved--both verbally and on the historic page--also recurs in these and in the later Sonnet XLVI, Written at Penshurst in Autumn 1788. The latter work is her early poetry's most extensive and overt exploration of the artist's role as historian, but its relevance to the sequence is lost on us unless we grasp the significance of the Arun sonnets written two years earlier. In Sonnet XXVI, To the River Arun, she describes a process of verbal storytelling, in which the tale of Otway is handed down through time and becomes a kind of local lore. On thy wild banks, by frequent torrents worn, No glittering fanes, or marble domes appear, Yet shall the mournful Muse thy course adorn, And still to her thy rustic waves be dear. For with the infant Otway, lingering here, Of early woes she bade her votary dream, While thy low murmurs sooth'd his pensive ear, And still the poet--consecrates the stream. Beneath the oak and birch that fringe thy side, The first-born violets of the year shall spring; And in thy hazles, bending o'er the tide, The earliest nightingale delight to sing: While kindred spirits, pitying, shall relate Thy Otway's sorrows, and lament his fate! …

Book Review: Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year

Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year. By Malcolm Guite. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2012. ISBN 978-1-84825-274-5. Pp. xvii + 82. $14.99. sonnet has for many centuries been a means of conveying religious ideas in a succinct, but rich and moving manner. frequent use of the sonnet form by poets such as George Herbert and John Donne, through to a number of contemporary poets, testifies to its enduring value and viability. In Malcolm Guite's collection of seventy sonnets for the Christian year, he presents a carefully crafted assortment of poems that can enrich the spiritual life of anyone who chooses to read them in a reflective manner. Conceptually based, to some extent, on John Keble's Christian Year (1827), Guite's work offers the same reassuring familiarity with those patterns of devotional behavior that shape the Christian calendar. In an everchanging world, the delegated seasons, in which we respond to highlights in the biblical narrative, can provide constancy and comfort. Guite's sonnets speak into this space, this need in our lives. In his introduction he unashamedly positions his collection as an aid to weekly worship, as a resource for spiritual reaffirmation and as a supplement to the established liturgies and festivals within the Anglican Church. Any Christian believer, from any tradition, however, could not fail to be touched by their thoughtful, devout, sometimes joyful, often celebratory nature. sonnets can be read individually or in groups. Each sonnet by its very nature offers integrity and satisfaction when read alone, but reading a sequence of sonnets can also be very meaningful. Guite's seventy sonnets are grouped in such a way that they give maximum benefit for anyone wanting to use them for devotional purposes. There are sonnets written in response to the seven Great Antiphons, sonnets concerned with Christmastide, Epiphany, Holy Week, the Stations of the Cross, and other significant events on the church calendar. measured cadences of the iambic pentameter make them all suitable for both public worship or for private devotion. There are some noticeable preoccupations in this collection. Biblical figures are picked out for individual attention, some obviously associated with particular saints' days. There is a sonnet for each of the four evangelists, plus Paul, John the Baptist, Peter, Thomas the Apostle, Stephen, and Mary Magdalene, amongst others. Some of the most memorable sonnets concern the status of women within the New Testament narrative and other pious traditions. The Visitation Easter Dawn, meets the women of Jerusalem meets his mother Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, The anointing at Bethany, Mothering Sunday The Annunciation and Mary, are all poems that indicate a strong resonance on the poet's part with biblical expressions of sympathy and support, especially from Jesus himself, for the intrinsic place that women play in the outworking of God's purposes in the New Testament. In so many instances the pastoral heart of the poet becomes apparent. A last beatitude,' which celebrates the role of quiet, faithful church members who undertake less public, sometimes menial roles within the life of any local congregation, is a good example: And blessed are the ones we overlook / Invisible on earth, without a voice, / In heaven their angels glory and rejoice. Although the sonnet form imposes inherent restrictions in terms of length, line length and rhyming pattern (most of Guite's sonnets are either Shakespearean or Petrarchan) it is still possible to engender quite delightful and sometimes startling changes in mood and purpose. An examination of several examples from Guite's collection reveals how this is achieved. For example, O Sapientia has a strongly reverential, invocatory quality, unpacking a sequence of heartfelt, sometimes paradoxical expressions of our total dependence on divine sustenance: cannot think unless I have been thought, / Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken; / I cannot teach except as I am taught, / Or break the bread except as I am broken. …

TRANSGRESSÃO E SEGREDO NUM POEMA DE FLORBELA ESPANCA

O presente artigo é uma análise semiótica do poema "Amar!", da escritora portuguesa Florbela Espanca. O texto aborda o problema da aparente contradição entre a forma tradicional do soneto e o conteúdo transgressor. Seguindo o percurso gerativo do sentido, com ênfase para o nível discursivo, conclui-se que o uso do soneto pode ser entendido como a modalidade veridictória do segredo ao sujeito cognitivo, já que o parecer da forma é negado e o ser transgressivo, tematizado pelo amor livre, é afirmado.

The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George by Denise Gigante

Denise Gigante. The Keats Brothers: The Life of and George. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. PP. 499+illus. $35. Collective biography begins with premise that no one lives alone. Living happens in physical and emotional spaces between people, and individual takes shape in and through his or her relationships with others. When those others are absent, they are, in many ways, all present. Denise Gigante probes and tests such notions in her new biography, The Keats Brothers: The Life of and George. Presenting as a central and guiding influence on both life and work of poet, Gigante traces intensity of Keats's emotional involvement with both his brothers, making case that their absence and loss, in particular--through death in case of Tom, through emigration to America in case of George--had a profound impact on poetry Keats wrote in his short career. said goodbye to and his new wife Georgiana in port of Liverpool in June of 1818; by end of August, at Tom's bedside, nursing him through painful last days of illness until his death came on December 1. Five short months brought loss of both brothers, although Keats had already registered his depression and sense of bereavement back in May as getting married and making plans for America: have two Brothers one is driven by 'burden of Society' to America other, with an exquisite love of Life, is in a lingering state. [I] may not follow them, Keats adds, either to America or to Grave--Life must be undergone, and I certainly derive a consolation from of writing one or two Poems before it ceases. Keats avows in this letter to Benjamin Bailey (10 June 1818) that love for my Brothers from early loss of our parents and even for earlier Misfortunes has grown into a [sic] affection 'passing Love of Women,' it is his deep tie to in particular that Gigante emphasizes, using pairing of and to elucidate aspects of poet's character and writings, as well as of Romantic period generally. The more sociable according to Gigante, was alter ego to his brother, poet (3). Yet John's sublimity had a real need for George's sociability, something, as Gigante suggests, Keats acknowledges in closing couplet of his 1816 sonnet, To My Brother written while two brothers were apart: But what, without of thee, / Would be of sky and sea? Gigante picks up on subtleties of relationship implied here. Is it George, himself, who is necessary to poet, or of enabled by his absence? Whenever at a distance, Gigante suggests, John discovered thoughts and feelings inside himself that he might not otherwise have known (14). The turn in sonnet from sublimities and wonders of sun, sky, and ocean to social thought of his brother is both a turn from ethereal to mundane matters, as well as a necessary check and constraint, like those of sonnet form itself, on sublime isolation always so tempting to Keats. Comparing to Dorothy Wordsworth, and To My Brother George to Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Gigante finds same vital sibling relationship propping up and making possible poetry of Keats: in both poems the speaker communicates experience to a sibling, a mirror of poet's own, best self (15). If represents sociability to John's sublimity, for Gigante he also stands as Cockney Pioneer to John's Cockney Poet. John's psychological explorations in search of poetry are matched with George's geographical explorations in search of enterprise: While delved into dark ravines of human consciousness ... made his way past wolves, black bears, wild pigs, and catfish weighing as much as humans (2). …

Sonnets: Edgar Degas, Claudius Popelin, and the poetry of generic constraints

In 1889, Degas embarked on a brief literary venture by writing a number of sonnets. This episode has been interpreted as an offshoot of his contacts with Stéphane Mallarmé. Degas dedicated one of these poems to José-Maria de Heredia, thereby seeming to acknowledge another literary criterion: Parnassian poetry. This literary context is arguably excessively narrow. This article aims to broaden the debate about Degas’ engagement with sonnet form in order to re-evaluate his achievements as a poet. In doing this, it also examines the sonnets of a neglected artist writer: Claudius Popelin (1825–1892). In 1888, Popelin published Un Livre de sonnets, a collection of 230 sonnets preceded by an extended homage to sonnet form, itself written as poetry. Although there is an intriguing coincidence of timing between this publication and the composition of Degas’ sonnets, this article will be concerned above all with the choice by both artists of the sonnet as a form, generically among the most conventional and difficult in contemporary literature. In the dichotomy that forever confronts visual artists who write literature, between generic transgression in the name of the visual and a stricter literary conformism, they leaned emphatically towards the richness of a conventional form. Degas’ skills as a sonneteer, admirably identified by Paul Valéry in his Degas, danse, dessin (1938), allowed him to add a verbal dimension to topics we find in his visual works: dance, theatre, the racetrack, modernity.

Imaginary Irelands in Ciaran Carson’s sonnet Cycle "The Twelfth Of Never"

Ciaran Carson’s sonnet cycle The Twelfth of Never is remarkable for its dense allusive texture that is not an end in itself but a means of exploring various constructs of Ireland and its history. Viewed as a body of poems, the sonnets create a metaphorical space that erodes the difference between fact and fiction, the colonial and anti-colonial clichés of Irishness and draws the reader into a game with the established literary modes. Therefore the current paper analyses the transformations of the sonnet form and the interplay between the Irish and English poetic traditions in The Twelfth of Never and their implications for the revision of stereotypical concepts essential to the metanarrative of Irish history.

“Appraise Love and Divide”: Measuring Love in Augusta Webster’s Mother and Daughter

measurement of love in sonnets, particularly Victorian sonnets, is a familiar, if under-examined, trope. love you, sweet: how can you ever learn / How much I love you? a lover asks his beloved in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Youth's Antiphony, one of the sonnets in his sequence The House of Life. (1) Rossetti depicts these words as the idle chatter of romance, filling the space, concealing Through two blent souls one rapturous undersong (1. 14). Later in the sequence, he further depicts this question as baseless, for Not by one measure mayst thou mete our love; the beloved corrects the lover for ever doubting equality (Equal Troth, II. 1, 11). Most famously, Elizabeth Barrett Browning attempts to answer the question for her beloved, offering to the she loves. (2) Numerous sonneteers, including both Rossettis, measure the intervals between the times when lovers meet. These poets are not only lauding the value of their beloveds but considering how much love it is possible to feel and to express. Even while declaring that their love is infinite and therefore impossible to quantify, they display its magnitude in quantifying metaphors that count love's ways or gauge its duration. Victorian sonnets often consider love to be eternal, but they nonetheless mark its temporal stages, fantasizing about the continuation of love in the afterlife. Underlying Augusta Webster's sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter is the startling proposition that love is a limited resource that can be divided, meted out. Her sequence transposes the concern for how much love is possible, how long love lasts, and how deep it is from the erotic context of the sonnet sequence onto a parent-child relationship. Webster emphasizes that a mother's love cannot escape measurement for she must track the growth of her daughter, their increasing distance, and the gap between the experiences of mother and daughter that is both pedagogical and nostalgic. Unlike an erotic love, often imagined to continue in an afterlife that is either religious, literary, or both, Webster's concept of a mother-daughter relationship a painful natural end. Webster sharply contrasts the idealized permanence of erotic love with the constantly changing quality of maternal love. Haunted by fears about the duration of love, the sonnet sequence expresses a compulsion to prove love's depth, comparing it to a still, silent lake and a void filled to the utterest. (3) Written retrospectively, after her daughter was an adult, and when Webster herself was close to death, Mother and Daughter is concerned with the mother's passing, and even in one instance, with the child's. Webster confronts the painful fact of transience in the parent-child relationship, lamenting the passage of time and the distance from her daughter that increases as she ages. To illuminate the bittersweet relationship between mother and child, Webster must turn to the inherent conditions and contradictions of the lyric, which is at once expansive in thought but economical in expression, rendering permanent a moment even as the meter tallies the time to the poem's end. Mother and Daughter declares that while mothers of multiple children must appraise love and divide it among the children, loving each with various stress, the mother of a single child gives all of her love to her child, who has the whole (25.14, 9, 13). Although the sonnets insist that mothers of only children need not measure out their love the way mothers of siblings must, they simultaneously express an anxiety about needing to quantify the strength and duration of this mother's love. Despite this resistance, the use of the sonnet form reflects the compulsion to count the stresses, sounds, and rhythms of maternal feeling. Webster's use of terms like stress and footsteps refers to the genre, reminding the reader that the poems inevitably measure maternal love as the poet measures accent, syllable, and line (8. …

Poetics and Layers of Meaning in Rossetti's Forced Music

Poetics and Layers of Meaning in Rossetti's Forced Music Jorge L. Contreras (bio) Dante Gabriel Rossetti's (1828-1882) large pastel drawing Forced Music (1877) (Fig. 1) has long puzzled scholars and historians. The model for the half-length nude figure is unidentified and appears in only one other Rossetti drawing. The narrative subject of Forced Music is reputedly based on a "Rosicrucian" story by Rossetti's friend Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832-1914), but the story has not previously been identified. The work's enigmatic title, as well as its alternate name Violante, have been equally mystifying. To understand Forced Music, one must look beyond the drawing's surface. At a narrative level, it is most likely based on Watts-Dunton's little-known sonnet "The Rosy Scar." The title Forced Music, however, draws upon Watts-Dunton's conceptualization of the sonnet form in melodic terms. The work's alternate title Violante plays still further with the dual imagery of music-making and sonneteering. Forced Music, then, jests with the viewer on multiple levels, offering a compelling visual commentary on both the "art" of poetry and the music of rhyme. I. Background: Rossetti, Watts-Dunton and Forced Music In order to discuss Forced Music, it is first necessary to consider Rossetti's relationship with two individuals beyond the usual circle of his Pre-Raphaelite associates: the poet, critic, and novelist Theodore Watts-Dunton, for whom the drawing was made, and the young Scottish writer William Sharp (1855-1905), who gave the work the name by which it is known. In autumn 1872 Rossetti returned to London after a period of convalescence in Scotland.1 He was soon confronted by a minor legal matter in which he required the assistance of a solicitor.2 Rossetti's friend and physician George Hake introduced him to Watts-Dunton,3 forty years of age and four years Rossetti's junior, who resolved the matter adeptly. But Watts-Dunton was no mere legal scrivener. As William Michael Rossetti recounts, his brother's new acquaintance was "a man of letters, poet, and critic; and very soon my brother found that this gentleman's converse and sympathy in literary matters were quite as welcome to him as his mastery of the law" (W. M. Rossetti, p. [End Page 189] 322). Though Rossetti already enjoyed significant celebrity and was widely lauded for his artistic and literary accomplishments, he gave surprising deference to the solicitor's poetic sensibility, particularly his mastery of the sonnet form. Rossetti effusively referred to Watts-Dunton as "the most original sonnet-writer living,"4 and it is Watts-Dunton's influence that is said to have renewed Rossetti's own interest in the composition of sonnets during this late period in his life.5 As evidence of this strong influence, Rossetti dedicated to Watts-Dunton his 1881 volume of poetry Ballads and Sonnets, which included his monumental sonnet cycle The House of Life. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Forced Music (1877) (Reproduced in Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Exhibition. Tokyo, 1990; private collection). By 1876-77, Watts-Dunton was among Rossetti's closest friends and companions.6 It was during this period that Rossetti made two unique drawings for Watts-Dunton: The Spirit of the Rainbow and Forced Music.7 The Spirit of the Rainbow is a chalk drawing depicting a full-length nude female figure encircled by a gauzy veil representing a rainbow, her head tilted carelessly to [End Page 190] the left as an invisible wind blows through her luxuriant hair. The drawing illustrates a sonnet by Watts-Dunton entitled "The Wood Haunter's Dream." The second, larger, drawing, Forced Music, is executed in pastels and depicts a half-length nude playing an ornate double-stringed lute.8 The figure is seated before a luminous, open window through which a hazy landscape is visible. To her left hangs a small, plain scroll bearing a crucifix and over her right shoulder can be seen a leafy plant. A pink scarf entwines her left arm and the neck of the lute, evoking the rainbow in Spirit of the Rainbow. The model for both pictures is the same...

Herbert’s “Avarice” in Context

Herbert’s “Avarice” in Context Frances M. Malpezzi In her edition of George Herbert’s poetry, Helen Wilcox notes that “Avarice” has generated little critical response and that few have tried to address questions about the poem posed by Helen Vendler.1 In The Poetry of George Herbert, the source to which Wilcox refers, Vendler had asked, “Why did Herbert feel moved to write Avarice? And in sonnet form?”2 Given the spiritual realities of virtue and vice that Herbert treats in his poetry, the subject matter of “Avarice” should not be surprising. Like the other Seven Deadly Sins, Avarice received notable literary treatment during the early modern period. Embodied by Goods in the morality play Everyman, serving as one of Lucifera’s counselors in Spenser’s House of Pride, and figured forth by Richard Barnfield’s Lady Pecunia (“The Encomion of Lady Pecunia: or the Praise of Money”), Avaricia (“The Complaint of Poetrie, for the Death of Liberalitie”), and Covetousness (“The Combat betweene Conscience and Covetousness”), Avarice was perceived as a sin of misdirected devotion. Devotion, correctly and incorrectly directed, is certainly a major concern in Herbert’s poetry. Following “The Sacrifice,” Herbert’s poems in “The Church” are about how the Christian should respond to Christ’s great redemptive act of love. The poems question and explore the appropriate ways to love God and God’s creation as well as how best to use one’s time in the world. Many of the poems specifically question how the minister and the poet should serve God. Given the human penchant for loving pleasure and shunning affliction and adversity, how does one learn to walk in the footsteps of Christ, the via purgativa? Far from being one of Herbert’s “least interesting sonnets,” “Avarice” takes on strikingly new significance when considered in its sequential and generic context.3 Both through its subject matter and its genre Herbert’s placement of “Avarice” within “The Church” underscores major themes in The Temple and follows up on an important concept introduced in “The Church-porch.” “Avarice” is preceded by “The Starre” and “Sunday” and followed by “Anagram of the Virgin Marie” and “To All Angels and Saints.” These five poems stress the dichotomy between the mundane and the [End Page 99] divine, between concupiscence and caritas, as they contrast human culpability with the love demonstrable in Christ’s redemptive act. Cumulatively they suggest the importance of distinguishing between true and false, between the radiant light of the Son and the glitter of worldly wealth, between true and false kings (God and Mammon), between kings divine and mundane, and between stamped images – God’s on the soul and the monarch’s on metal. Asserting that the love of the Lord of hosts who pitched his tent in Mary’s womb is the highest value, the poems characterize the appropriately directed and ascending love for the immutable of members of the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant and the inappropriately directed and descending love of the wordly for the transient. The first poem in the series initiates the emphasis on God’s light and love. The star in the poem of that title exemplifies proper devotion in its service to and glorification of God. The speaker calls upon this “Bright spark” (l. 1) that illuminates its “Saviours face” (l. 2) to serve as a shooting star, leaving its divine residence to take up “a bad lodging” (l. 6) in his heart that it may refine him through its fire and light. Christ-like, the star would descend to a human habitation as a loving service to the Father. He asks the star to “burn to dust / Folly, and worse then folly, lust” (ll. 9-10) so that he may be “disengag’d from sinne and sicknesse” (l. 13). Purified, healed of the dis-ease of sin, the speaker then would soar with the star to its divine home, and with the star find a … placeAmong the beams, which crown the face Of him, who dy’d to part Sinne and my heart. (ll. 21-24) Recognizing the foolishness of this worldly lust, the speaker realizes that the bright and redemptive grace of Christ, once...

Legitimizing Voice: Petrarchan Form in Mary Darby Robinson's Sonnet Sequence, Sappho and Phaon

This article explores Mary Robinson's use of the legitimate sonnet form as a means of establishing specifically poetic authority for women writers in general, but for herself in particular. Appropriating both the voices of Sappho and of Petrarch, Robinson portrays the passion that stifled Sappho's art, but simultaneously reclaims the female voice through the sonnet sequence itself. Redirecting attention from biographical readings of Robinson's work, the essay sets the cultural and literary contexts for Robinson's use of the sonnet sequence, and then provides a detailed reading of the work, demonstrating her use of male-dominated tradition in order to challenge and redefine that tradition.

Laura's Laurels: Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innominata" 1 and 8 and Petrarch's Rime sparse 85 and 1

Laura's Laurels:Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innominata" 1 and 8 and Petrarch's Rime sparse 85 and 1 Mary Moore (bio) Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome Has many sonnets: so here now shall be One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from meTo her whose heart is my heart's quiet home, To my first Love, my Mother, on whose kneeI learnt love-lore that is not troublesome; Whose service is my special dignity.1 The poem quoted above, which opens A Pageant and Other Poems, the 1881 volume in which Christina Rossetti published the sonnet sequence "Monna Innominata," depicts sonnets as "full of love," suggesting plenitude coupled with ease of formal containment, a kind of capacious abundance. The poem also associates the sonnet form with trouble. Since maternal love provides "love-lore that is not troublesome," and since the sonnet form traditionally voices erotic love, troublesome love expressed in sonnets must be erotic.2 The sound of "love-lore" evokes a major source of the sonnet's troublesome "love-lore"—Petrarch's twin loves: poetic laurels and the lady Laura. Associating inherited literary forms, and allusions to them, with ideas common at the time of their origin—with "lore,"3 Christina Rossetti thus preceded contemporary theory on genre and intertextuality. In describing the book's "many sonnets," the dedicatory poem also foreshadows "Monna Innominata's" focus on the sonnet, a focus Rossetti manifests through her use of that poetic form within poems and as structure for the fourteen-sonnet metapoem; through a prose statement alluding to seminal male and female sonneteers—Petrarch, Dante, and Barrett Browning4—and through the subtitle, "A sonnet of sonnets." The subtitle presents Rossetti's sonnets as about sonnets, owned by, and/or born of sonnets, even, as Sharon Bickle notes, as the best of sonnets.5 It also [End Page 485] highlights a material element of "Monna Innominata": the subtitle presents the fourteen sonnets literally as one sonnet, the metapoetic structure William Whitla elucidated.6 Since each poem is preceded by quotations in Italian from Dante and Petrarch, Rossetti literally incorporates and contains the language of these male precursors in her own larger poem, ultimately in her book. Her refusal to print any of the poems separately (Whitla, p. 93) and her sense of sonnets as containers "full of love," construct her poem as the larger, more powerful container, a container of containers. Rossetti thus displays poetic mastery under the sign of female voice through a formal metaphor that involves both containment and magnitude: the outermost "sonnet"—Rossetti's—is of necessity the greatest in size and in power. In light of this ideologically nuanced play with the sonnet form and with the implicit issues of gender embedded in the sonnet tradition, Rossetti's "Monna Innominata" has received much deserved critical attention in the last twenty years, including studies of the influence of Dante and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,7 yet Petrarch's role in the intertextual play has not drawn careful analysis. Those critics who have addressed the Petrarchan allusions have primarily discussed Petrarchism, rather than the referenced poems of Petrarch, and have focused on the epigraphs' lines, rather than closely reading the entire poems to which Rossetti alludes side by side with her own poems—an attention that has, on the other hand, been paid to the verses referenced in the epigraphs from Dante. Knowledge of the family's abiding interest in Dante has eclipsed the possible influence of Petrarch, and the preface describes Petrarch as "as a great tho an inferior bard," but while the allusions from Dante demonstrate a complex intertextual dialog, they derive from Purgatorio not from Vita Nuova, the obvious formal precursor.8 Petrarch, then, the only sonneteer whose sonnets feature in the epigraphs, must carry important allusive power for Rossetti in her sonnet of sonnets. Furthermore, Rossetti's attraction to and her reading of Petrarch's sonnets as ultimately about spiritual struggle, a struggle that "Monna Innominata" also enacts,9 has recently been demonstrated by Michele Martinez. These factors surely justify more nuanced attention to the specific Petrarch poems Rossetti evokes as we read her own related poems. In fact, many...