Here's something I wrote in my first year at Edinburgh Uni. It still amuses me.
While I was revising for my Scottish Literature exam today a rather curious fact dawned upon me concerning the widespread influences of Petrarchan love. Petrarch was a 14th C Italian poet who popularized the sonnet form. He was famous for love poems devoted to Laura, his deceased beloved. These poems praised her as the personification of idealized womanhood and described his love for her as a means of reaching God: from temporal love to abstract love to arrive finally at divine love. Some poets who were heavily influenced by Petrarch include William Fowler, who wrote a love sequence titled “The Tarantula of Love”, and Drummond, who explored the tensions and similarities between erotic and divine love in his sonnet sequence devoted to Auristella (dawn star), a lady after his own heart.
In attempting to think of further examples of Petrarchan love I came to realize that its influences are as far reaching as the 20th C, if one pauses to consider lyrics of popular music as a form of poetry. For example, popular late 20th C musician/poet Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame demonstrates erotic love finely interwoven with religious devotional desires in “Closer”:
I want to fuck you like an animal
I want to feel you from the inside
You get me closer to God.
Although the versification of this transition from temporal to divine love does not take place within strict sonnet form, the influence of Petrarch’s poetry is nevertheless undeniable in its extreme language and combination of earthly and religious pleasure.
Wednesday 2 April 2008
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2 comments:
That's so rude. How dare you! You shouldn't talk about Petrarch like that... :-P
I love it! I remember you told me about this song at some point.
Oh well, the idea of 'love' (whatever that means, and you know what I think) comes from the troubadours. The ideas behind the language of 'love' we use today are the same as theirs, but adapted to our present day taste of lack of it.
Sergi.
PS: Monday I was talking about love poetry/songs for three hours at uni. That's too much for a hopeless single man, who knows all the theory, but has no clue about the practice. :-P
Alas, love is much better in theory than in practice - and that's coming from someone who's in a happy relationship!
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