17 pages • 34-minute read
Sonnet 18
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Themes
The Overwhelming Power of Beauty
The central reason why the speaker of “Sonnet 18” loves his “lady” (Line 2) is her overwhelming beauty, or her “lovely face” (Line 2). While Laura’s specific features (her blonde hair as well as her facial features) are discussed in other poems in the Canzoniere, this particular sonnet focuses on a central metaphor comparing her beauty with light. In Italian, luce (light) is repeated as a rhyme word in the octave, appearing at the ends of Lines 2, 3, 6, and 7. While her shining face can be compared to her golden hair, the metaphor of “Sonnet 18” is more concerned with the power of the light, a life-giving power like the sun.
Beauty controls the speaker’s mind, heart, and life. Petrarch draws upon a model of courtly love from troubadours and Arthurian romances that predate him, and he inspires a specific kind of Petrarchan lover in generations of poets who come after him. The model of love defines a woman’s beautiful face as the seat of love, or what inspires feelings of love. Beauty consumes the mind, or “light leaves [one] not a thought” (Line 3) in Kline’s translation. Robert Durling’s prose translation of this sonnet, “in my thought the light remains that burns and melts,” grammatically structures the sentence so that the light is what burns and melts. In Kline’s translation, it is the first person speaker, the “I” (Line 4), who burns and melts. In either case, the light is hot and powerful enough to change the structure of matter.
The fiery nature of the light, a metaphoric representation of love inspired by beauty, is part of the courtly love model. For instance, in the Romance of the Rose, Guillaume de Lorris wrote, “[t]he more a man gazes on what he loves, the more he sets fire to his heart and bastes it with bacon fat.” In “Sonnet 18,” after the light (or the speaker) melts, the speaker expresses fear about his heart breaking apart. In other words, the fire spreads from head to heart. This demonstrates how it is an overwhelming power that controls not only thoughts but feelings. Kline presents the speaker’s concern as “my heart parts from my self,” echoing the Italian “parte” (Line 5), and how Durling presents the end of the previous quatrain: “melts within me, bit by bit.” In Italian, “bit by bit” is parte a parte. Kline leaves “bit by bit” out in Line 4 for poetic lineation. However, in both translations, the heart coming apart is related to the woman’s beauty and taking that beauty away from the speaker’s sight.
The Specter of Death
The lady in “Sonnet 18” has power over the speaker’s life and death. In the second quatrain, the speaker sees “the end of [his] light nearing” (Line 5). When Petrarch’s lady goes away, her light no longer shines on him, and her absence is like the absence of life. This kind of excessive sentiment is associated with Petrarchism. Furthermore, later sonnets in Petrarch’s sequence are written for Laura after her death. Her death is a turning point in the entire collection.
In “Sonnet 18,” the sestet is more focused on death than the octave. The volta, or turn, is the movement to this theme. Death, or morte in Italian, is repeated as a rhyme word in Lines 9 and 12. Line 9 features “colpi de la morte,” which Kline translates as “deadly blows” (Line 9) and Durling as the “blows of death.” Durling’s translation makes death itself the subject that is striking the speaker. This creates a character of death, a grim reaper figure that populated many works of medieval art, such as paintings, murals, and tapestries. Petrarch writes more extensively about the archetypical figure of death in his Triumphs. Kline’s English versification of “Sonnet 18” (rather than a more direct prose translation like Durling’s) obscures the subject (who delivers the blows), giving room for the violence to come from the lady and/or death itself. Withholding love is akin to dealing mortal wounds, in the Petrarchan tradition.
In the last tercet, death is associated with speaking. The speaker believes “one deadly word / would make men weep” (Lines 12-13). Durling translates “le parole morte” as “dead words.” When looking at Kline’s and Durling’s translations, the speaker’s words kill and/or are lifeless. Words cannot compare to the life-giving beloved; Petrarch is limited as a spurned poet, holding words but not Laura. This speaks to how sonnets are a form of overhearing a conversation between a lover and their beloved. Petrarch does share his words, but he ends his poem by saying he wants to cry alone. This implies that there are words too sad to share, just outside the formal constraints of the poem.
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