Close Reading of Mary Wroth's Sonnet #40.
Close Reading of Mary Wroth’s Sonnet #40 Sarah Kimbrell LTBR-104A
In Mary Wroth’s sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Wroth writes in the Petrarchan convention of one to an eternally absent lover, speaking of the love they hold. But the similarities end there, for instead of speaking with abject devotion to her lover, Wroth’s Pamphilia speaks of a more internal and constant love than Petrarchan sonnets. Where Petrarch and his followers, most notably Wroth’s own illustrious family, used sonnets to name and publicly exonerate their lover, Pamphilia loves in private introspection, and Amphilanthus name is mentioned only in the title. Sonnet #40 addresses a very specific loss for a woman, miscarriage, and in addressing this subject, creates a woman’s space for love and loss in a world of poetry dominated by men. Wroth is very aware of her poetic legacy and pushes her poetry past the overblown, exhibitionist sonnets of courtly love to create something new.
Stylistically, while Wroth conforms to the Petrarchan convention of using iambic pentameter and an octave consisting of two quatrains, both the rhyme scheme and the following quatrain and an ending couplet are variations on the practice. The sonnets first quatrain gives us the image of a pregnant woman bearing ‘false hope’. Wroth uses enjambment in the first three lines to make the size of Pamphilia’s loss explicit; her lines are so full they spill over into the next. Forgive the pun, but the lines are absolutely pregnant with meaning. “False hope which feeds but to destroy, and spill/ What it first breeds; unnatural to the birth/ Of thine own womb; conceiving but to kill,” (1-3). Wroth’s word choice enforces this miscarriage theme. ‘Feeds’ has an old English meaning to specifically ‘suckle young’, ‘breed’ and ‘conceive’ still retain their obvious maternal meanings, and ‘spill’ has an old English meaning of ‘to slay or kill’. In the fourth line, ‘plenty’ retains it’s meaning as abundant, but the line sets it in opposition to the old English word ‘dearth’, meaning ‘dearness and costliness’. False hope gives of itself plenty, but at a high price, and in this metaphor the hope of a child is destroyed.
