The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600

(coco) #1

contains many famous instances of personifi cation.
Within eight lines, its narrator attributes sweetness to
rain, forcefulness to drought, a vascular system to
plants, breath (and inspiration) to the wind, age to the
sun, and animal form to the stars. As these examples
indicate, personifi cation is basically an attempt to use
metaphor to understand the mysteries of nature and
human-nature interactions. Despite its frequent use,
personifi cation poses problems for poets, since grant-
ing nature a kind of sentience may make for good
verse, but it misrepresents the nonhuman world. This
problem would later be characterized by John Ruskin
as “pathetic fallacy.”


Larry T. Shillock

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA)
(1304–1374) Francesco Petrarca, better known
simply as Petrarch, spent his early years at Avignon
where his father, a lawyer, worked at the papal court.
Petrarch also studied law, but he eventually devoted
himself fully to literary pursuits. He spent most of his
life, until 1361, in Avignon and Vaucluse, although he
retired to Padua, where he enjoyed the friendship of
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO. Credited as one of the fathers of
humanism, Petrarch not only studied the classical
authors but also avidly sought lost manuscripts. His
most famous discovery, made in 1345, was of Cicero’s
letters to Atticus, Brutus, and Quintus, at the cathedral
library in Verona.
Petrarch’s large literary output is mostly in Latin,
including the unfi nished epic L’Africa, though he is
now best known for a VERNACULAR collection of care-
fully constructed and ceaselessly revised love poems,
popularly called the Canzoniere but formally named
Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Song Book). Most of these
poems focus on the poet’s unrequited love for a woman
he calls Laura. These are divided into two main sec-
tions: poems 1–263, written while Laura was alive, and
poems 264–366, written after her death on April 6,
1348, exactly 21 years after he fi rst saw her.
It is hard to overestimate Petrarch’s infl uence and
importance in the history of European poetry. GEOF-
FREY CHAUCER translated one of the SONNETs (number
132 of the Song Book) in his Troilus and Criseyde, and
he used Petrarch’s Latin translation of a tale in Boccac-


cio’s Decameron as the basis for “The Clerk’s Tale” in
The CANTERBURY TALES. SIR THOMAS WYATT and HENRY
HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY, both translated Petrarchan
sonnets. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY’s collection ASTROPHIL AND
STELLA was strongly infl uenced by Petrarchan models,
as was EDMUND SPENSER’s AMORETTI. Indeed, all of the
numerous and popular SONNET SEQUENCEs owe a debt
to Petrarch’s work.
FURTHER READING
Foster, Kenelm. Petrarch: Poet and Humanist. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1984.
Mann, Nicholas. Petrarch. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1984.
Wilkins, E. H. Life of Petrarch. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1961.
K. P. Clarke

PETRARCHAN PARADOX Sustained use of
ANTITHESES within a SONNET or SONNET SEQUENCE. A par-
adox, in general, is a statement that contains two seem-
ingly oppositional parts. These appear contradictory or
incompatible on the surface but, upon deeper consid-
eration, make sense. Similar to this is an oxymoron,
which is essentially a compact paradox in which two
successive words seemingly contradict each another
yet provide a complete description. The Petrarchan
paradox combines these two approaches, which are
used to describe the object of the poet’s desire, the
unobtainable lady. She is both fi re and ice, both free
and trapped, both love and hate. Particularly common
Petrarchan paradoxes describe lovers burning in seas
of ice and melting under icy glares. Another common
theme focuses on self-annihilation, which is accom-
plished through loving.
FURTHER READING
Berdan, John M. “A Defi nition of Petrarchismo.” PMLA 24,
no. 4 (1909): 699–710.

PETRARCHAN SONNET See ITALIAN (PET-
RARCHAN) SONNET.

“PHILIP SPARROW” (“PHYLLYP SPAR-
OWE”) JOHN SKELTON (1505) JOHN SKELTON’s
poem “Philip Sparrow” is divided into three clearly

“PHILIP SPARROW” 317
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