In a few short weeks I, armed with three and a half weeks of listening to Pimsleur's Italian 1, will be descending upon Italy for ten whole days with my brilliant, generous, and fluently Italian speaking cousin. In honor of the miraculous tangent my life has taken, I have decided to tackle the Petrarchan sonnet form. In preparation I am currently reading
Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works (Oxford World's Classics)
http://www.powells.com/biblio?inkey=65-9780192839510-2
At the moment I'm almost finished with the
Letter To Posterity portion of the book
and in tone and self reflection Petrarch reminds me of no one so much as Mr Collins from
Pride and Prejudice. To be fair he is a good deal cleverer and a much better poet, but his carefully cultivated modesty -- even as he name drops as heavily as an up-and-coming production assistant at an LA soiree -- is a bit hilarious. He does have his moments though, my favorite quote at this juncture is his reason for quitting law school:
"It was not because I disliked the power and authority of law, which is undoubtedly very great or,
because of the endless references it contains to Roman antiquity, which I admired so, but rather because I felt it was being continuously degraded by those who practiced it. I hated the idea of learning an art which I would not practice dishonestly, and could hardly hope to practice otherwise. Had I made the latter attempt, my scrupulousness would have undoubtedly been ascribed to incompetence."
Petrarch was living and writing in the 1300's. How little we change.
So, Petrarchan sonnets. We all know, or at least I hoped I've managed to convey, that the Shakespearean sonnet's rhyme structure is ABAB,CDCD,EFEF,GG. Well, not so with the Petrarchan. I will now have to bend my brain around ABBA,ABBA,CDCDCD. No couplet at the end! And I have a bad feeling about that extra A...
