What are the main features of the sonetto petrarchesco?
The poetic genre of the sonnet has been used since the Middle Ages by various authors such as Dante Alighieri and the Sicilian Jacopo da Lentini, but it was the Florentine poet Francesco Petrarca who in the 14th century crystallised this form into more regular patterns of metre and topics. The typical structure of the sonetto petrarchesco is made up of two quartine and two terzine, following the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CDE CDE. As you can see, the quartine are composed in rima incrociata, whereas the terzine are in rima ripetuta or replicata.
Petrarca’s sonnets are collected into his work known as Il Canzoniere. While still composing the sonnets, Petrarca referred to them as “rime sparse” (“scattered rhymes”, Canzoniere I), and only later the poems were put together in a coherent collection which would serve as a model for sonnet sequences across Europe (for example, for the English Renaissance sonnet sequences by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare). The poems in Il Canzoniere narrate the story of Petrarca’s love for Laura, from their first meeting on 6th April 1327 (Good Friday). The collection is divided into two parts, In vita and In morte di Laura, where the loved woman is contemplated, remembered and conjured up by the mind’s eye as an aesthetic vision. The poetry that Laura inspires will gain Petrarca la corona d’alloro del poeta laureato (the crown of bay leaves of the laureate poet). As for formal stylistic devices, the most used ones by Petrarca are antithesis, oxymoron and paradox, which put into words the poet’s feeling of oscillation between contemplation and introspection, as well as his emotional paralysis and instability.
