lover lover lover

I thought the Petrarchan lover was actually pretty interesting.  Yes, it was a little creepy to some people, especially the modern day female readers but it makes for good entertainment.  It doesn’t seem out of the unusual though; a lot of what we have read so far has to do with some type of worshipping and praising of someone. We have read works that have praised God and Jesus like Beowulf and the belief in his providence and also Margery Kempe who is obsessed with Jesus to the point that she lusts for him basically.   We also read tales of knighthood where people held their king in high regard and defended his honor such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In these poems, its now the woman (so god/religion, then king/ruler/government, and now the woman) has man wanting to worship them.

A core component of these poems is the unrequited love, not being reciprocal, that these men were getting themselves into.  It was a one-sided love affair. Canzoniere 292 shows idolization that leads to nothingness that these guys would have over their women.  It starts out, “ Those eyes, ‘neath which my passionate rapture rose, the arms, hands, feet, the beauty erewhile…” This shows how these Petrarchan lovers were quick to fall in love with a woman with good physical traits.  Later in the poem it goes into the one-sidedness that leads to the inevitable disappointment, “Left dark without the light I loved in vain, adrift in the tempest on a bark forlorn; dead is the source of all my amorous strain, dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn, and my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.” Love doesn’t always go the way you had planned. 

I also thought it was cool how poems and other works of literature were allowed to kind of be kicked around between artists.  This is the plus side of a pre-copyright laws came into play.  From Petrarch to Shakespeare all these guys touched on some of the similar ideas.  It was cool to see how the stars were given different identities by the different artists and then Shakespeare in sonnet 15 found a way to merge the stars at nature and fate.