The octave introduces a problem or conflict in the mind of the speaker, in the first four lines (known as the first quatrain). However, in Italian sonnets in English, this rule is not always observed, and CDDCEE and CDCDEE are also used. In a strict Petrarchan sonnet, the sestet does not end with a couplet (since this would tend to divide the sestet into a quatrain and a couplet). For background on the pre-English sonnet, see Robert Canary's web page, The Continental Origins of the Sonnet.
This form was used in the earliest English sonnets by Wyatt and others. Some other possibilities for the sestet include CDDCDD, CDDECE, or CDDCCD (as in Wordsworth's "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room" ). Petrarch typically used CDECDE or CDCDCD for the sestet. The rhyme scheme means the last word of the line should rhyme with the pattern of ABBAABBA or other variants. Conditions and Exceptions apply.The rhyme scheme for the octave is typically ABBAABBA. This work may be freely reproduced, stored and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose. A friend of Boccaccio, Petrarch died at his home in Arqua, among the Eugenean hills near Padua, in 1374. He is particularly associated with Avignon, where he lived for many years, later travelling widely in Northern Italy, and living for a time in Venice.
It was well received and in 1341 he was crowned in Rome as the first poet laureate since antiquity. Initially trained as a lawyer in the universities of Montpellier and Bologna, his first extensive literary work, an epic in Latin, celebrated the Roman general Scipio Africanus. His use of the sonnet form, particularly in the lyrics dedicated to his ideal love, Laura, was imitated throughout Europe, and became a mark of the civilised literary culture of his own and later periods. A scholar, poet, diplomat, and early humanist, his rediscovery of the ancient Roman writers did much to fuel the 14th century Renaissance. The poems were written over a forty year period, the earliest dating from shortly after 1327, and the latest from around 1368, and were a major influence on the poetry of the European Renaissance, especially in France, Spain, and England, where sonnet sequences were written until well into the seventeenth century, the form being revived and extended later by the English 19th century poets.įrancesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, was born in Arezzo, Italy in 1304. Mostly using the sonnet form the poems were written in the Italian vernacular rather than Latin, and Petrarch, like Dante, exploited and extended the language to convey a wider range of feeling and expression.Īs well as his love for Laura, Petrarch communicates not only his own personality but also his humanist, secular and religious values, providing, like Dante, a body of work focussed, in a major way, for the first time in later European literature, on the poet himself, his individuality, and his spiritual journey, although he also looks back to the Roman achievements of Ovid, Horace, and Propertius.
Petrarch’s Canzoniere is an innovative collection of poems predominantly celebrating his idealised love for Laura, perhaps a literary invention rather than a real person, whom Petrarch allegedly first saw, in 1327, in the Church of Sainte Claire in Avignon. Note: The sectional divisions do not occur in Petrarch's text. Write lofty and joyful thoughts, to the sound of water. Let the beautiful laurel grow so, on the green bank,Īnd let him who planted it, in the sweet shade, The three hundred and sixty-six poems of the Canzoniere with, occasional, illustrated footnotes.
A selection of fifty-three poems forming an introduction to the Canzoniere.