Henry Constable and the Petrarchan Sonnet

• The most commonly used English foot.

• "an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable"

• As the stressed syllable follows the unstressed syllable, the iamb is a "rising meter".

• As one iambic foot is composed of two syllables, the iamb is a "duple meter".

• "A metric line is named according to the number of feet composing it."
• i.e. trimeter: three feet; octameter: eight feet
• pentameter: five feet

• "A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme."

• also called the Italian sonnet
• named after Petrarch
• composed of an octave (abbaabba) and a sestet (cdecde OR cdccdc)
• The subject matter was primarily that of the adoration of a young male lover.

    As noted, the Petrarchan sonnet was known to speak of a young man's love and adoration.  Constable wrote four of these sonnets to St Mary Magdalene.  I find this to be somewhat ironic as a predominant theme running through these sonnets is the requital of a secular love for a spiritual love.  As a result, these poems become a negotiation of the conflict between corporeal and eternal love, with Constable using St Mary Magdalen as the vehicle through which to engage in this negotiation.

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created by Heather C. Milligan