Note the use of ‘feminine’ line endings (i.e. Its opening line, ‘A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted’, immediately establishes the sonnet’s theme: Shakespeare is discussing the effeminate beauty of the Fair Youth, the male addressee of these early sonnets. Sonnet 20 by William Shakespeare is one of the more famous early poems in the Sonnets, after Sonnet 18. 1517-47), who came up with the idea of using the rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg which Shakespeare uses in this poem. Shakespeare and the sonnet form are almost synonymous in English, although the Bard didn’t invent the sonnet form that bears his name: that was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. It burns with passion that to mine is near. That mirrorest her sweet face, her eyes so clear,Īnd of their living light canst catch the beam! O pleasant country-side! O limpid stream,
His blithe rays gild the outskirts of thy towers!
O trees, with earliest green of springtime hours,Īnd all spring’s pale and tender violets! O plain, that hold’st her words for amuletsĪnd keep’st her footsteps in thy leafy bowers! ’Mid which my pensive queen her footstep sets O joyous, blossoming, ever-blessed flowers! Writing in the fourteenth century, Petrarch establishes a number of the key features that would be associated with the sonnet during the Renaissance: the ideals of courtly love, the unattainable and semi-divine woman (Petrarch’s muse was a woman named Laura, perhaps named for the laurels that were a symbol of poetic achievement), and the ‘look but don’t touch’ attitude of the poet. Although he didn’t invent the sonnet form – that mantle goes to a thirteenth-century Sicilian poet named Giacomo da Lentini – Petrarch was the first person to leave a real mark on the form and showcase its wonderful possibilities.
Petrarch, ‘O Joyous, Blossoming, Ever-Blessed Flowers!’.
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