Courtly love and the Petrarchan inheritance

The oldest convention in English love poetry is not English. Courtly love (amour courtois), refined in medieval Provence and codified for Europe by Petrarch in his fourteenth-century sonnets, supplies the default grammar:

• The unattainable beloved — remote, chaste, elevated, usually silent. Desire is sustained precisely because it is not satisfied.
• The suffering lover — sleepless, wounded, enslaved, burning and freezing at once. Love is figured as illness and as war.
• The blazon — the beloved catalogued part by part: hair like gold, lips like coral, eyes like the sun. Note what the blazon does: it dismembers a woman into a list of precious objects.
• Oxymoron and antithesis — freezing fire, sweet pain, living death. The lover's contradiction is the form's engine.
• The lover as servant or vassal — a courtship modelled on feudal service, which quietly imports a hierarchy into intimacy.

Exemplar, not syllabus: any poet or text named here is only an illustration of the tradition. AQA revises its anthologies and set-text lists, so work from the poems your class actually studies. The exam rewards your grasp of the tradition and the method, not a fixed reading list.

Reading a convention

The sonnet: a form that argues

The sonnet is fourteen lines of argument. It is the reason love poetry is so often logical rather than merely emotional.

• Petrarchan (Italian) — an octave (8 lines, usually abbaabba) proposing a problem, then a sestet (6 lines) responding. The hinge is the volta, the turn, typically at line 9.
• Shakespearean (English) — three quatrains and a couplet (ababcdcdefefgg). The three quatrains develop, elaborate or complicate; the couplet clinches, or ironises. A couplet that is too neat is often a couplet you are meant to distrust.
• The volta is the most examinable feature in the form. Find it, and ask what changes across it: tense, addressee, tone, confidence.
• Deviations are arguments. A missing volta, a broken rhyme, a fifteenth line, a sonnet that refuses to resolve — each is a poet quarrelling with an inherited shape.

Iambic pentameter matters when it breaks. A regular line is a settled mind. A spondee, an inverted first foot, a caesura falling in an unexpected place — these are the moments where feeling escapes form, and they are where AO2 marks are hiding.

Form as argument

Metaphysical wit and the conceit

Seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry (Donne, Marvell, Herbert and their contemporaries) takes the courtly inheritance and roughs it up.

• The conceit — an extended, audacious metaphor yoking the erotic to the intellectual: compasses, maps, flies, mathematics, theology. The pleasure is in the strain: you are meant to feel the metaphor being forced to hold.
• Argumentative structure — the poem as a case. If, therefore, but, thus. Metaphysical love poems are frequently attempts to persuade — and it is legitimate, and sharp, to ask who is doing the persuading and who is being talked at.
• Colloquial abruptness — a dramatic opening in the middle of a quarrel. Speech, not song.
• Carpe diem — seize the day: time is short, death is coming, therefore yield. A convention whose logic is worth examining rather than admiring, since its charm is doing coercive work.
• Sacred and profane fused — the language of religion used for sex, and of sex for religion. Blasphemy as intensity.

The AO5 question that pays here: the metaphysical love poem is the most intellectually flattering mode in the tradition — the reader is invited to admire the wit and, in doing so, to side with the speaker. Notice how rarely the woman answers. The brilliance is real; so is what it is being used to do.

Carpe diem

Sort the convention

Tap a feature, then tap the tradition of love poetry it belongs to.

Romantic love and the modern lyric

Romantic (late 18th–19th century) — love relocated from courtship ritual into the self:

• Sincerity and interiority — the poem as the record of an authentic feeling rather than a performance of wit. (Whether sincerity is itself a convention is a very good question to ask.)
• Nature as the medium of feeling — landscape, weather and season become the language of love. Watch for the pathetic fallacy, and ask what it does: it makes a private emotion look like a law of the universe.
• Love, death and transcendence — desire that reaches past the mortal. The beloved is idealised into something the world cannot supply.

Victorian — love collides with marriage, property, respectability and doubt. The dramatic monologue arrives and, with it, the poem in which a speaker reveals more than he means to, which is love poetry's great gift to psychological analysis.

Modern and contemporary — the tradition is inherited ironically:

• Anti-romantic plainness — domestic, ordinary, unheroic love; the shared kitchen rather than the sonnet's shrine.
• Love after doubt — desire without a metaphysics to underwrite it.
• The tradition answered back — poets who write from the position the blazon assigned to the silent object, and give her the pen.
• Love beyond the heterosexual courtship plot — and the recovery of poems that had to be written in code.

Reading across the ages

Match the poetic method to its effect

Tap a method on the left, then the effect it produces.

What love was allowed to be

AO3 in this paper is the history of what love was permitted to mean — and it should always change the reading.

• Marriage as property — for most of the tradition's history, marriage transferred land, money and legal personhood. A poem urging love against a father's wishes is contesting an economic arrangement, not only an emotional one.
• Chastity and the double standard — the beloved's virtue is her value, and her value is her family's. The carpe diem poem is written into that market.
• Religion — sin, damnation, the soul. Erotic language borrowed from devotion is not decoration; for a seventeenth-century reader it is a live transgression.
• Legal and social change — married women's property, divorce, contraception, the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Each changes what a love poem can say plainly.
• Reception — the same sonnet reads differently to a reader who assumes love ends in marriage and to one who does not. Meanings move.

Deletion test: if you could cut your context sentence and the analysis would stand unchanged, it was decoration. Weld it — because X was legally true, this line would have carried Y for its first readers, whereas now it lands as Z.

Context that works

Reading love poetry through theory

• Feminist — the tradition's default arrangement is a speaking man and a silent woman. Ask who has the pen, who is looked at, and what happens in poems where the beloved speaks. Also: idealisation is not the opposite of objectification, it is a form of it.
• Marxist — love poems are full of money. Dowries, estates, the beloved priced in gold and pearl, the rival who is richer. Follow the property.
• Psychoanalytic — desire as lack; the beloved as a screen for the lover's own fantasy. The love poem is very often about the lover.
• Queer readings — the ungendered addressee, the poem that had to be written in code, the tradition's assumption of a heterosexual courtship plot. This lens frequently reveals that the assumption was ours rather than the poem's.
• Eco-critical — the pathetic fallacy examined rather than enjoyed: nature conscripted into human emotion, and the landscape as somebody's estate.

Discipline: a lens sentence must produce a claim about the poem. Not a feminist would criticise this, but the poem gives its speaker ninety-eight lines and its beloved none, and its final image of her consent is therefore something he has written for her.

AO5 in practice

Comparing texts across time

Section C links two texts (poetry, prose or Shakespeare, as your combination allows). AO4 is heavily weighted here — but AO4 does not mean listing similarities.

1. Open on the theme, not the text: Love poetry has always had to decide whether desire is best served by satisfaction or by delay — and these two texts, four centuries apart, take opposite views.
2. Argue in idea-paragraphs (the beloved's voice; desire and time; love and money; the ending), each handling both texts.
3. Chase the difference. Two texts that both idealise a beloved are not interesting. Two texts where one idealises and the other exposes idealisation as a way of not seeing a person — that is an essay.
4. Let the older text be strange. The pre-1900 text is not a rough draft of the modern one, and modern is not a synonym for better.

Time discipline: three sections, 25 marks each. Section C is the one most often rushed, and it is the one where AO4 lives.

Comparative writing

The big ideas to take into the exam

Love poetry is a six-hundred-year argument. Your job is to hear which side each poem is on. Press Finish to see your score.