English Literature / Unit 6 ENL 0520 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading an Elizabethan Sonnet
The idea
Elizabethan sonnets reward a fixed sequence of reading. First, name the form by its scheme: an octave and sestet is Petrarchan, the form Wyatt brought into English; three quatrains and a couplet is the English form; interlocked quatrains are Spenser's. Second, identify the convention the sonnet uses or overturns: the cruel, distant lady, the suffering lover, love as sickness, war or servitude. Third, find the turn, at line nine or at the couplet, and say what changes there: the argument, the tone or the addressee. Fourth, read the final couplet or sestet as the answer to the problem the opening set. Fifth, check for irony, because poets also mocked the conventions they used. Wyatt's "They flee from me" turns from memory to bitterness, and its last lines, about being "so kindly" served, reverse the courtly ideal: the speaker, not the lady, is the one abandoned.
In practice
Scheme, convention, turn, answer, irony.
Where people slip
Do not read the conventions as autobiography. The cruel lady and the suffering lover are stock figures of the Petrarchan sequence, so questions ask how a poem handles them, not what happened.
Your place on the trail
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