The Italian Sonnet
by Bridgett O'Flaherty



The term “sonnet” is derived from the Italian, meaning ‘little sound’
or “little song”. A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter
(this being a meter in which each line contains five iambs - an unstressed
syllable followed by a stressed one) -
Hast thou/seen the/sun shin/eth in/ thine eyes?
with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme. In the thirteenth century the sonnet
saw it’s beginnings in the writings of Dante Alighieri (famous for the Divine
Comedy), whose verses were similar to the sonnet, but it was the poet
Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) from the Italian Renaissance who gave life to
the new poetic form.

The “Italian” or “Petrarch” sonnet was the first of two major sonnets
styles. The poem is usually broken into an octave (eight lines), with the
rhyming scheme usually abbaabba, and a sestet (six lines), most often rhyming
cdecde. In this way the poem’s theme is treated in two parts. The octave
states a problem, asks a question or expresses an emotional state. In the se
stet, the problem is resolved, the question answered or the tension
relieved. Petrarch’s Canzoniere, a sequence of poems including 317 sonnets
addressed to an idealized beloved named Laura, set a precedent making secular
love a predominant theme of sonnets yet to come. An example of an English
translation of one of Petrarch sonnets -

Se la mia vita da l'aspro tormento
Si può tanto schermire, e da gli affanni,
Ch'i' veggia per vertú de gli ultimi anni,
Donna, de' be' vostr'occhi il lume spento,
E i cape' d'oro fin farsi d'argento,
E lassar le ghirlande e i verdi panni,
E 'I viso scolorir, che ne' miei danni
A llamentar mi fa pauroso e lento,
Pur mi dará tanta baldanza Amore,
Ch'i' vi discovrirò de' miei martiri
Qua' sono stati gli anni e i giorni e l'ore;
E se 'l tempo è contrario a i be' desiri,
Non fia ch'almen non giunga al mio dolore   
Alcun soccorso di tardi sospiri.    
If from the cruel anguish my life tries
To shield itself, and from the many cares,
That I may see at the end of the years,
Lady, the light extinguished of your eyes,
And the hair of fine gold to silver turn,
And garlands and green clothes all worn and spent,
And the face pale that in my sad concern
Makes me timid and slow now to lament,
Yet Love will give me such aggressive powers
That I shall tell you of my martyrdom
The years, such as they were, the days, the hours;
And when the time to kill desire is come,
At least my grief will know and recognize
The little comfort of late-coming sighs.


The second sonnet style is the more popular “Elizabethan” or
“Shakespearean” sonnet. In truth it was not Shakespeare who reinvented the
sonnet for England, but was Sir Thomas Wyatt (a diplomat, 1503-1542) and
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547) who introduced the Italian sonnet
and translated Petrarch for English readers. As these two men wrote their own
sonnets, they began to adapt the rhyming pattern to a language less filled
with rhymes. The Elizabethan sonnet usually consisted of three quatrains and
a couplet - that is, the rhyming scheme of abab cdcd efef gg.

Sonnets reached their peak in popularity in England the 1590’s. Some of
the world’s best known examples of sonnets came from this period from such
writers as Edmund Spenser (The Fairie Queene), Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel
and Stella), Samuel Daniel (Delia), and of course William Shakespeare. It is
even known that Queen Elizabeth took a hand at translating Petrarch’s poems.
The poem that I wrote was pattened after the Petrarch style. This style
remained very popular in Italy. Over two hundred years later sonnets were
still used to express the great emotion of love. This was not limited to the
male half of the species. In Milan in 1553, Giovanni wrote in his ‘The
Factious Nights’ of how the upper class would nights of Carnival before lent
assembling in mixed company, entertaining each other with story telling,
poetry, riddles, singing and dancing.

In Venice around the same time, live a women poet named Gaspara Stampa
(c.1523-1554). While there is debate whether or not Gaspara was a courtesan
like her famous contemporary Veronica Franco, it is know that Gaspara did
performed in mixed company and frequented salons in men’s homes.
Gaspara only had three poems published during her short life, but her
sister published a volume of 311 of Gaspara’s poems named ‘Rime” after her
death. In these poems Stampa uses Petrarchan convention by assuming Petrarch's
role: as Petrarch had described his suffering for love of a silent Laura, so
Stampa details her love and loss of a generally unresponsive count. As with
Petrarch, the poetry is perhaps more important to the poet than the person
who inspired it. here is an example of Gaspara’s body of work:
Se così come sono abietta e vile
donna, posso portar sì alto foco,
perché non debbo aver almeno un poco
di ritraggerlo al mondo e vena e stile?
S'Amor con novo, insolito focile,
ov'io non potea gir, m'alzò a tal loco,
perché non può non con usato gioco
far la pena e la penna in me simìle?
E, se non può per forza di natura,
puollo almen per miracolo, che spesso
vince, trapassa e rompe ogni misura.
Come ciò sia non posso dir espresso;
io provo ben che per mia gran ventura
mi sento il cor di novo stile impresso.
If I, who am an abject, low-born woman,
Can bear within me such lofty fire,
Why should I not possess at least a little
Poetic power to tell it to the world?
If Love, with such a new unheard-of flint
Lifted me up where I could never climb,
Why cannot I, in an unusual way,
Make pain and pen be equal in myself?
If Love cannot do this by force of nature,
Perhaps as by a miracle he may
Passing and bursting every common measure.
How that can be, I cannot well explain
But yet I feel, because of my great fortune,
My heart imprinted with a strong new style.

So the sonnet I have wrote would have also been written by an upper
class/nobility women in the mid-1500’s who was educated well and lived most
likely in one of the more progressive cities like Milan or Venice. My poem
describes love love lost and the hope of it’s return.
It would have been written down on sheet of paper (which was considered
thin) or most likely vellum (calf or lamb skin) which was much more popular
and durable at the time. And more costly. The ink would have been a
egg-based tempura, since oil-based ink would smeared on the vellum. The poem
could have also been printed at this period of time, as was done with
Gaspara’s poems. Printed books was quickly becomes a regular object in the
world. In 1452, Johann Gutenberg conceived of the idea for movable type. In
his workshop, he brought together the technologies of paper, oil-based ink
and the wine-press to print books. By 1501 there were 1000 printing shops in
Europe, which had produced 35,000 titles and 20 million copies.
Today, I just printed my sonnet on the computer because 1) it would be
impossible to get a hold of true vellum and today’s vellum is very different
from vellum of the past and 2) the calligraphy ink I used bled into the paper
I used too much. So I reproduced it on the computer to look as closely as
possible as to what it may have looked like back then.

 

Hast thou seen the sun shineth in thine eyes,
Heard the sweet nightingale’s song in thine ears?
Hast thou tasted thine own bittersweet tears,
And reached for a dream further than the skies?
Dost thou’s happiness wear a smug disguise?
An eager partner to dance with thou’s fears,
Producing moonlit vows and souvenirs
Then just turns away with whipsered goodbyes.
Then thou hath know love in its rarest form,
In its purest emotion, yet fleeting,
Leaving behind players without a script,
Standing upon the stage forced to perform
A languishing scene, doomed to repeating
Its wistfulness, with only hope equipped.

~ Baroness Squire Bridgett O’Flaherty

 

Resources
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies & Courtesans.
-Edited by Laura Anna Stortoni
The Facetious Nights by Giovanni Straparola (written in 1553)
www.britannica.com
www.sonnets.org
www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/s/stampa/rime/html/cornice.htm
www.members.nbci.com/darsie/library/petrarch.html
www.byzant.com/poetry/sonnet.com
www.communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Books/printech.html