Name: Petrarch and the Sonnet
Uploaded: 2016-09-29T04:23:48.000Z
Duration: 24 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi, I'm Rebecca Balcarcel. Let's find out where the sonnet comes from, the sonnet being

Modal verbs - B1

one of the most popular forms in the English language. You might think started with Shakespeare.

Adverbs of manner

But it didn't. It actually started in Italy, with a guy named Francesco Petrarch. And Shakespeare

picked it up a couple-hundred years later. Let's find out more.

Frank in love, and how it led to the most famous of poem forms, the sonnet. Frank is

my pet name for Francesco, of course, and we'll see how love is what inspired him to

be so prolific with his sonnet writing. So here we have Francesco,

born in 1304, couple-hundred years before Shakespeare. In the letter he wrote to posterity,

he talked about his early life, and he mentions his

schooling. He says, "I learned as much of grammer, logic, and rhetoric as my age permitted,

or rather, as much as it is customary to teach in school. How little that is, dear reader,

thou knowest." This is funny because, obviously,

he doesn't think he learned that much in school, and we can sometimes relate. Young Francesco

was pretty promising, and everybody thought, wow, he

could be something like a lawyer. He started to study law. He says, "I then set out to

study law. I heard the whole body of the civil law, and would, as many thought, have distinguished

myself later, had I but continued my studies.

I gave up the subject altogether, however, so soon as it was no longer necessary to consult

the wishes of my parents. My reason was that although the dignity of the law, which is

doubtless very great, I felt it to be habitually degraded

by those who practiced it." So like now, sometimes lawyers were doing unscrupulous things, and

he did not want to go along with that. He said, "It went

against me painfully to acquire an art which I would not practice dishonestly, and could

hardly hope to exercise otherwise." That means that successful lawyers had to be dishonest,

and therefore, he just couldn't do it. He goes on: "Had I

made the latter attempt, my scupulousness would doubtless have been ascribed to simplicity."

He means that, if he had tried to be an honest lawyer,

people would have thought he was stupid, that he was simple. And so this was not going to

work at all. He says, "At the age of two and twenty I returned home." Now what's he going

to do? Well, let's go back to the idea of the church. Turns

out that his father was the one who wanted him to be a lawyer, and his father died, so

he was able to go to his first love, which was the church.

In four years he completed the minor orders, and he becomes a diplomat for the church.

That means he wasn't a priest, but rather, he would go around, broker peace treaties,

stuff like that. Now this job allowed him to travel quite a

bit. He was in France when something very important happened. Young Petrarch, early

twenties, is sitting in church, when suddenly he sees Laura.

So, as the historian Peter Sadlon puts it, "It's April 6th, 1327, Good Friday, at an

Easter mass, when Petrarch sees Laura for the first time." Now we don't really know

who Laura even was, so we have a bit of a mystery here. It could be

that she is Laura de Noves, who would have been born in 1310, but unfortunately was already

married by the time Petrarch meets her. So if it's that

Laura, then his love is never going to be requited. That means it's never going to be

returned, and he'll have to love from afar. We're not even sure that he ever even talked

to her, but he certainly fell in love with her, and he would

go on to write hundreds of poems to her, which in years to come would be shared, as people

took them around the world. They were translated into

every known language of the time. They became very popular. One of the reasons for this

popularity is probably that everyone can related to love at first sight. Laura is 17 when she

meets Petrarch, or she sees him, or really he sees

her, at mass when they're at church. And here's the actual remains of the church today, in

Avignon, which is again in France. Some nice Gothic

architecture there. And here is another portrait of Laura, and more remains of the church there,

and the little plaque that announces in French, that this is the place where Laura and Petrarch

met. It even talks about their immortal love, and it's immortal because the sonnets have

Here we see the building as it is today. It's a theater, and you can still see some of the

archways and windows that look kind of church-like, but it is now in use as a performance base.

So the drama of great love can continue on stage.

Petrarch eventually writes 366 poems about Laura. 317 of them being sonnets. Now he collects

them all together, and he calls the group "Canzoniere," which means songs, like "cancion,"

in Spanish means song. Critic Stanley Martin writes that

Petrarch reimagined the conventions of love poetry in the most profound way: Love for

the idealized lady was the path towards learning how to

properly love God. Notice how in this painting we see Laura appearing before Petrarch almost

like an angel, and of course we have Cupid as well, about to shoot him with an arrow

of love, but the attitude he has toward her is quite reverent,

is worshipful, and it's through loving a woman that a man can purify his soul and discover

divine love. Here we see Petrarch depicted with a portrait

of Laura, which is on the right. With a pen in his hand, he reclines, leaning back toward

her, looking to her for inspiration. He also seems to be in attitude of ecstasy, hoping

that looking at her will inspire a new poem. Now Petrarch

wrote a sonnet that captures the moment when he first met Laura. He talks about how there

was an eclipse that day, and then goes on to say how love

attacked him, but he did not defend himself. "It was on that day when the sun's ray / was

darkened in pity for its Maker, / that I was captured, and did not defend myself, / because

your lovely eyes had bound me, Lady. / It did not seem

to me to be a time to guard myself / against Love's blows: so I went on / confident,

unsuspecting; from that, my troubles / started, amongst the public

sorrows. / Love discovered me all weaponless, / and opened the way to the heart through

the eyes, / which are made the passageways and doors of tears: / so that it seems to

me it does him little honour / to wound me with his arrow, in that

state, / he not showing his bow at all to you who are armed." So he's referring to Cupid

here, who is able to wound Petrarch with his arrow, but

Laura is not going to be hurt by the arrow, because she is armed. There's some kind of

defense that she has against this love and this arrow of Cupid. But he's weaponless,

and his eyes are the way that the love has managed to enter, because

he sees her, and is so struck and moved by her that he does indeed fall in love. Now

let's get ready to look at the structure of this poem. You

notice how it has a stanza of four lines, and then another four lines, and then we have

two sets of three. So basically, we have a set of eight and a set of six, and this is

typical for what's now called the Petrarchan sonnet. So we have

in most Petrarchan sonnets that octave, which is the set of eight lines, and then a sestet,

which is the set of six lines. Now remember your root

words, and you know that "oct" means eight and "ses" means six. There's also a rhyme

pattern: A B B A A B B A, in the octave. So that means we might have something like nation,

fair, care, station, for the first set, and the same sounds

again for the second set. For the sestet we move into some new sounds, and we label those

C, D, the C sound, the D sound. And there'll be an

alternating of C D C D. Or even a fifth sound might come in: C D E C D E. In any case, we

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Petrarch and the Sonnet

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