Love And Petrarchan Poetry example essay topic

Throughout the course, English 221, there have been many themes and ideas introduced through the texts which can be traced through most of the literary periods examined in the course. Some of these themes include religions for example in Beowulf, the notion of heroes which one can see in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, morality in Everyman and The Paradise Lost, Metaphysical Poetry in most of the works of John Donne, and finally Petrarchan Love. In the early 16th century many of the works written were Petrarchan Sonnets. These sonnets show the notion of one sided or unrequited love. In almost all of the works read in this course, for example, works by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sidney, from Atrophic & Stella and A moretti, and Shakespeare's sonnets, Petrarchan love was shown as a male speaker in love with a female object. The female is usually blond and blue eyed and beautiful, very pure looking.

This love is platonic, as the woman shows no love for the male in return. The man is portrayed as in love and the woman is portrayed as cruel and senseless since she will always turn down the male. Mary Wroth was the first woman to have a collection of Petrarchan love poetry published which was Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in 1621. Mary Sidney Worth's life was a hardship filled with broken hearts, lost loves, and struggles. It is obvious in many of Mary's writings that she was using her own broken loves and life's experiences. In many of her pomes she uses issues taken from her own life.

Pamphilia to Amphilantnus is about many stories of women disappointed in love because of being married off by their families to the wrong man, as she was to her husband. Worth's romances were mainly those of subjection, limitation and envy. She spent her life trying to overcome these obstacles and the men in her life. You can see some of these some struggles in her characters. The Petrarchan poem centers on its fragile and self-obsessed "I". Part of the power of Petrarch ism had traditionally been that it encouraged its readers to acknowledge that the self that writes feels not harmony but continual dissatisfaction.

Except under the most stringent ideological constraints the Petrarchan "I" is always under attack, always liable to be surprised by change, dislocated by the pull of impossible futures and indelible pasts. In Wroth's case this painful discovery is all the more threatening because of the way the poems highlight the dilemmas of her gender assignment. In the Petrarchan scheme the lover typically asserts that he becomes the victim of the power of the beloved. From such a systematization of the dynamics of desire, it seems that only two possible gender positions are possible, "one of rapacious domination, the other of docile submission". Yet though the (male) lover may assert that he is trapped or paralyzed by the power of the (female) beloved, he is inevitably the active participant: he pursues, is called to public duties as courtier or soldier; he speaks out, hunts, fights, complains. A man has the independence to move, to be restless, unfaithful, or simply assume the freedom to move through the world; a woman remains at home, constant, reassuring, mothering.

Wroth's emphasis on Pamphilia's constancy never removes her from this male fantasy in which a man assumes he may move, travel, or choose, and a woman stays at home. The woman's role is to be the focus for his self-division and his physical and emotional restlessness. Moreover, her absence or coldness, while a matter for complaint, and the cause of his insecurity, is often the necessary stimulus for his being able to feel that self-division and to write about it. Mary Wroth's poems constitute a major document in tracing the ways both assigned and lived gender roles were under pressure in the early seventeenth century. Not only does the poem I chose relate to many of the class themes such as love and petrarchan poetry, reading her poetry was very inspiring because of the fact that she was the first woman to get petrarchan poetry published.