Tuesday, September 16, 2014

In "Sonnet 90," how does Petrarch use the sestet to develop a more complicated view of love? please explain why you feel this way.

In Petrarch's Sonnet 90, the theme, as usual, is
unrequited love, which he inserts in the parentheses:


readability="5">

(Seldom they shine so
now.)



The sestet presents not
as a solution but a meditation.  The speaker meditates on the nature of love after he
has lost his love and after she may have lost her beauty.  Whereas her looks are
temporal and fleeting, his love (or the wound where it used to be) is permanent (lives
on).


I know my first, real heartbreak has never fully
healed.  Has yours?


Whereas the octet presents his love as
mortal beauty, the octet presents her as "divine," godess-like,
"angelic":


She did not walk in any mortal
way,
But with angelic progress; when she
spoke,
Unearthly voices sang in unison.
She seemed
divine among the dreary
folk

And then, the last two
lines:



You say
she is not so today? Well, though the bow's unbent, the wound bleeds
on.



We have rhetorical
question which acknowledges that she may not be as beautiful as she once was.  Even so,
he says he still feels the wounds from Cupid's unbent bow of love.  The heart is still
open and bleeding long after it was first shot.

No comments:

Post a Comment

In Act III, scene 2, why may the establishment of Claudius's guilt be considered the crisis of the revenge plot?

The crisis of a drama usually proceeds and leads to the climax.  In Shakespeare's Hamlet , the proof that Claudius is guilty...