sonnets

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sonnets
From sonnetta or little song
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Definition(s)

• 14 lines of poetry with set rhyme
• Usually iambic pentameter
• Italian sonnets 11 syllables/line
• French sonnets 12 syllables/line (aka
  Alexandrine)
• Meant to be sung
• Usually about courtly love

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Some Sonneteers

• Petrarch (1304 - 1374)
• Wyatt (1503 - 1542)
• Spenser (1552 - 1599)
• Sidney (1554 - 1586) Shakespeare
  (1564? - 1616)
• Donne (1571 ca. - 1631)
• Milton (1608 - 1674)

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Sonnet Sequences

• Many sonneteers wrote in cycles or sequences
• Sidney Astophil Stella (1580)
• Edmund Spenser Amoretti (1595)
• Shakespeare (Dark Lady)?
• John Donne Songs Sonnets

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Francesco Petrarch

• 1304 - 1374
• Poet laureate of Rome (1341)
• Wrote his sonnets to the fair-haired, blue-eyed
  Laura

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Petrarchan or Italian

• Octave
• (abba abba) closed rhyme
• Problem or question
• Sestet
• (cde cde or cdc cdc) interlocking rhyme
• Answer or (re)solution

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Thomas Wyatt

• 1503 1542
• Lover of Anne Boleyn before she married Henry
  VIII

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Edmund Spenser

• 1552 - 1599
• Attended Cambridge University B.A. (1573) and
  M.A. (1576)
• Faerie Queene greatest work

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Spenserian

• 3 quatrains (abab bcbc cdcd)
• Problem or question
• Couplet (ee)
• Answer or (re)solution

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William Shakespeare

• 1564 - 1616
• Major playwright
• Venus Adonis
• The Rape of Lucrece

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Shakespearean

• 3 quatrains of interlocking
• (abab cdcd efef)
• Problem or question
• 1 couplet
• (gg)
• Anser or (re)solution

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Hardin Craigs Groupings (i)

• Generally
• 1-126 addressed to highborn patron
• 127-152 addressed to Dark Lady
• 127 not a true sonnet
• Some say 145 is not Shakespeares

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Hardin Craigs Groupings (ii)

• 1-17 Addressed to a noble youth, urging him to
  marry and reproduce
• 18-26 Variety of themes
• 27-32 48-50 Poet is absent from friend

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Hardin Craigs Groupings (iii)

• 56-58 Friend is absent from poet
• 33-35 Foreshadow an estrangement caused by fault
  in poets friend
• 38-42 Tell specifically of the fault alluded to
  in 33-35

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Hardin Craigs Groupings (iv)

• 53-77 the power of love and the beauty within us
• 71-74 a vision of the poets own death
• 78-86 rival poet sequence

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Hardin Craigs Groupings (v)

• 88-93 continuing the theme of estrangement loss
  of love and of patronage
• 94-96 obscure, but on a friends fault
• 92-99 theme of absence

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Hardin Craigs Groupings (vi)

• 100-104 an apology for a long silence
• 104-125 celebration of beauty, virtue, renewal
  of protests of eternal faithfulness

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Other Groupings

• Tucker Brookes
• Charles Wolff
• http//members.tripod.com/charleswolff/ROTS/r3.h
  tml

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Finis