one of the most popular forms in the English language. You might think started with Shakespeare.

But it didn't. It actually started in Italy, with a guy named Francesco Petrarch. And Shakespeare

picked it up a couple-hundred years later. Let's find out more.

Frank in love, and how it led to the most famous of poem forms, the sonnet. Frank is

my pet name for Francesco, of course, and we'll see how love is what inspired him to

be so prolific with his sonnet writing. So here we have Francesco,

born in 1304, couple-hundred years before Shakespeare. In the letter he wrote to posterity,

he talked about his early life, and he mentions his

schooling. He says, "I learned as much of grammer, logic, and rhetoric as my age permitted,

or rather, as much as it is customary to teach in school. How little that is, dear reader,

thou knowest." This is funny because, obviously,

he doesn't think he learned that much in school, and we can sometimes relate. Young Francesco

was pretty promising, and everybody thought, wow, he

could be something like a lawyer. He started to study law. He says, "I then set out to

study law. I heard the whole body of the civil law, and would, as many thought, have distinguished

myself later, had I but continued my studies.

I gave up the subject altogether, however, so soon as it was no longer necessary to consult

the wishes of my parents. My reason was that although the dignity of the law, which is

doubtless very great, I felt it to be habitually degraded

by those who practiced it." So like now, sometimes lawyers were doing unscrupulous things, and

he did not want to go along with that. He said, "It went

against me painfully to acquire an art which I would not practice dishonestly, and could

hardly hope to exercise otherwise." That means that successful lawyers had to be dishonest,

and therefore, he just couldn't do it. He goes on: "Had I

made the latter attempt, my scupulousness would doubtless have been ascribed to simplicity."

He means that, if he had tried to be an honest lawyer,

people would have thought he was stupid, that he was simple. And so this was not going to

work at all. He says, "At the age of two and twenty I returned home." Now what's he going

to do? Well, let's go back to the idea of the church. Turns

out that his father was the one who wanted him to be a lawyer, and his father died, so

he was able to go to his first love, which was the church.

In four years he completed the minor orders, and he becomes a diplomat for the church.

That means he wasn't a priest, but rather, he would go around, broker peace treaties,

stuff like that. Now this job allowed him to travel quite a

bit. He was in France when something very important happened. Young Petrarch, early

twenties, is sitting in church, when suddenly he sees Laura.

So, as the historian Peter Sadlon puts it, "It's April 6th, 1327, Good Friday, at an

Easter mass, when Petrarch sees Laura for the first time." Now we don't really know

who Laura even was, so we have a bit of a mystery here. It could be

that she is Laura de Noves, who would have been born in 1310, but unfortunately was already

married by the time Petrarch meets her. So if it's that

Laura, then his love is never going to be requited. That means it's never going to be

returned, and he'll have to love from afar. We're not even sure that he ever even talked

to her, but he certainly fell in love with her, and he would

go on to write hundreds of poems to her, which in years to come would be shared, as people

took them around the world. They were translated into

every known language of the time. They became very popular. One of the reasons for this

popularity is probably that everyone can related to love at first sight. Laura is 17 when she

meets Petrarch, or she sees him, or really he sees

her, at mass when they're at church. And here's the actual remains of the church today, in

Avignon, which is again in France. Some nice Gothic

architecture there. And here is another portrait of Laura, and more remains of the church there,

and the little plaque that announces in French, that this is the place where Laura and Petrarch

met. It even talks about their immortal love, and it's immortal because the sonnets have

preserved their love forever.

Here we see the building as it is today. It's a theater, and you can still see some of the

archways and windows that look kind of church-like, but it is now in use as a performance base.

So the drama of great love can continue on stage.

Petrarch eventually writes 366 poems about Laura. 317 of them being sonnets. Now he collects

them all together, and he calls the group "Canzoniere," which means songs, like "cancion,"

in Spanish means song. Critic Stanley Martin writes that

Petrarch reimagined the conventions of love poetry in the most profound way: Love for

the idealized lady was the path towards learning how to

properly love God. Notice how in this painting we see Laura appearing before Petrarch almost

like an angel, and of course we have Cupid as well, about to shoot him with an arrow

of love, but the attitude he has toward her is quite reverent,

is worshipful, and it's through loving a woman that a man can purify his soul and discover

divine love. Here we see Petrarch depicted with a portrait

of Laura, which is on the right. With a pen in his hand, he reclines, leaning back toward

her, looking to her for inspiration. He also seems to be in attitude of ecstasy, hoping

that looking at her will inspire a new poem. Now Petrarch

wrote a sonnet that captures the moment when he first met Laura. He talks about how there

was an eclipse that day, and then goes on to say how love

attacked him, but he did not defend himself. "It was on that day when the sun's ray / was

darkened in pity for its Maker, / that I was captured, and did not defend myself, / because

your lovely eyes had bound me, Lady. / It did not seem

to me to be a time to guard myself / against Love's blows: so I went on / confident,

unsuspecting; from that, my troubles / started, amongst the public

sorrows. / Love discovered me all weaponless, / and opened the way to the heart through

the eyes, / which are made the passageways and doors of tears: / so that it seems to

me it does him little honour / to wound me with his arrow, in that

state, / he not showing his bow at all to you who are armed." So he's referring to Cupid

here, who is able to wound Petrarch with his arrow, but

Laura is not going to be hurt by the arrow, because she is armed. There's some kind of

defense that she has against this love and this arrow of Cupid. But he's weaponless,

and his eyes are the way that the love has managed to enter, because

he sees her, and is so struck and moved by her that he does indeed fall in love. Now

let's get ready to look at the structure of this poem. You

notice how it has a stanza of four lines, and then another four lines, and then we have

two sets of three. So basically, we have a set of eight and a set of six, and this is

typical for what's now called the Petrarchan sonnet. So we have

in most Petrarchan sonnets that octave, which is the set of eight lines, and then a sestet,

which is the set of six lines. Now remember your root

words, and you know that "oct" means eight and "ses" means six. There's also a rhyme

pattern: A B B A A B B A, in the octave. So that means we might have something like nation,

fair, care, station, for the first set, and the same sounds

again for the second set. For the sestet we move into some new sounds, and we label those

C, D, the C sound, the D sound. And there'll be an

alternating of C D C D. Or even a fifth sound might come in: C D E C D E. In any case, we

have 14 lines total, and there's a turn at the ninth line. So after the octave, we get

what's called a volta, which is a shift in the poem, and

this is usually the point where the poet starts to really make an interesting point. The whole

thing will be in a particular rhythm. It's called

iambic pentameter, which means it's in a rhythm that goes like this: da DA da DA da DA da

DA da DA. So let's look at another example. This is sonnet 292. You can see the purple

part is the octave, the brown is the sestet, and the volta

is marked with the brown arrow. I'll just read it. "The eyes I spoke of once in words

that burn, / the arms and hands and feet and lovely face

/ that took me from myself for such a space / of time and marked me out from other men;

/ the waving hair of unmixed gold that shone, / the smile that flashed with the angelic

rays / that used to make this earth a paradise, / are now a

little dust, all feeling gone; / and yet..." Now this is the volta, right? Because "yet"

always signals a change. Everything that has come before has

described the beautiful lover. However, she's died, because all of her hair and eyes and

so on are now dust, and the feeling from them is gone. So the lover has died, and yet he

remains. So the sestet it going to talk about that: "and yet

I live, grief and disdain to me, / left where the light I cherished never shows, / in fragile

bark on the tempestuous sea. / Here let my loving song

come to a close; / the vein of my accustomed art is dry, / and this, my lyre, turned at

last to tears." This is so sad. He compares himself to a bark, which is a boat, on a stormy

sea. He says my loving song, the poem, is going to have

to come to a close, because the inspiration for it, this vein, is now dry. And this, my

lyre, meaning poetry itself, and poem-writing, has turned to

tears. Now let's take a closer look at the rhythm that Petrarch uses. It's called iambic

pentameter. Don't let the word scare you. "Penta" means five, so you have five of something.

"Meter" means rhythm. It just means we have a rhythm

that has five of something, and what the something is is iams. So one iam would be a da-DA, and

five of them go, duh-DUM duh-DUM duh-DUM duh-DUM duh-DUM. We have an unstressed syllable followed

by a stressed one. "Until I finish this I'll stay awake." There's an example. Let's feel

it in our bodies by using a snap clap five times. So

it goes like this: Snap clap snap clap snap clap snap clap snap clap. "Until I finish

this I'll stay awake." That'll help you feel the rhythm physically. And then you can sense

it in the poem, as you read it. Now let's take a look at some

conventions. That means some typical themes that Petrarch uses in his poems, and then

afterwards, everybody else uses in their sonnets too. Courtly

love for an unattainable lady is common in many sonnets, in particular Petrarch. Love

is horribly painful. The angelic lady is cruel in rejecting the poet's love. Love is a religion

who's practice egnobles the lover. Love at first

sight appears in many sonnets. Christian and Classical, which means Greek, imagery coexist.

We have both references to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as

well as Hera or Aphrodite. Cupid is cruel and powerful. The poet is at war with himself,

and has internal struggles. These are typical of Petrarch's sonnets, and later sonnet-writers,

sonneteers, will use the sonnet to explore those same

themes even as they use different words.

Eventually, Laura dies, and Petrarch writes on a fly-leaf of a favorite book, which is

written by Virgil, he says, "Laura, who was distinguished by her own virtues, and widely

celebrated by my songs, first appeared to my eyes in my early

manhood, in the year of our Lord 1327, upon the sixth day of April, at first hour, in

the Church of Santa Clara, Avignon." So that's when he saw her

for the first time. In the same city, on the same month of April, on the same sixth day,

at the same first hour, in the year 1348, that light was taken from our day, while I

was by chance in Verona, ignorant, alas! of my fate." So when

he says, "that light was taken" he means that Laura was taken. And he happened to be in

Verona, which is where Shakespeare chose to set Romeo and

Juliet, where it takes place. So that's kind of interesting. Poor Petrarch.

Now the question of who Petrarch's Laura really was continues unanswered to this day. It might

have been Laura de Noves, but we're not entirely sure. Trying to answer this question, her

tomb was dug up, and when it was opened, they discovered

a lead box inside. In the lead box was a medal that represented a woman ripping at her heart,

and under the medal was a sonnet by Petrarch. That seems pretty conclusive, but we have

to remember that Petrarch's sonnets were circulated widely, and this Laura may have simply thought

it was charming that Petrarch was writing to some

other Laura, and it was just a coincidence. Either way, Laura was certianly an inspiration

for Petrarch.

Even after Laura's death, Petrarch continued to work on sonnets in her honor, writing 103

new sonnets. And then, in 1341, while he's still in his 30s, remember, Petrarch is crowned

poet laureate of Rome. Apparently Paris offered

to crown him their poet laureate as well, since he spent lots of time in France, but

he decided that Rome was more proper, since he was born an Italian.

Besides sonnets, he writes hundreds of letters that he collects into books. He also writes

books on faith, including conversations with a character that he names "Truth," and also

he puts himself in conversation with saints, so old, dead

saints. He decides to write to them and invent their replies. Then he writes longer poems

and meditations on humans reaching their potential. He does

this because he's quite interested in the Greek and Roman writers, in humans developing

their skills in logic, in creativity, and he brings all of this into his contemporary