Love poetry from before 1900 offers deep insights into historical perspectives on romance and relationships.
The Petrarchan sonnet and Shakespearean sonnet represent two major forms that poets used to express matters of the heart. The Petrarchan form, developed in Italy, follows a strict structure of 14 lines divided into an octave (8 lines) and sestet (6 lines), with the rhyme scheme ABBAABBA for the octave and CDECDE or CDCDCD for the sestet. These Petrarchan sonnet characteristics include themes of unrequited love, idealization of the beloved, and internal emotional conflict. The turning point between octave and sestet, called the volta, often marks a shift from problem to resolution.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 and Sonnet 130 showcase different approaches to love poetry. Sonnet 116 explores the unchanging nature of true love, declaring "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." Through powerful literary devices like metaphor and personification, the poem presents love as a guiding star that remains constant through storms and time. The theme of eternal love resonates throughout, emphasizing that genuine affection transcends physical appearance and social constraints. Meanwhile, Sonnet 130 takes a more realistic approach, deliberately subverting the traditional blazon by describing the speaker's lover in decidedly non-idealized terms. This demonstrates how pre-1900 love poetry could both embrace and challenge conventional romantic expressions. The line by line analysis of these works reveals sophisticated poetic techniques and deep philosophical insights about the nature of love, making them enduring examples of romantic literature that continue to resonate with modern readers.
