Petrarch’s sonnet model consisted in an octave and a sestet, the model was gradually transformed when he entered the British scene to adapt to the English language.

The progressive transformation was due to:

1) Sir Thomas Wyatt who mainly translated Italian sonnets from Italian into English  

2) Henry Howard Earl of Surrey who first reorganized the structure of Petrarch’s model into the typical structure of the Elizabethan sonnet consisting on 3 quatrains and a couplet. Surrey contribution to the sonnet is both thematic and structural. In a few words he tailored the sonnet to the needs of the English language, but the most creative sonneteer was Shakespeare. He was able to reshape the typical conventions of the sonnet (courtly love poetry) to create something new.

Petrarch’s   Passa la mia nave colma d’oblio  denotative analysis.

This sonnet consists of 14 lines.

In Petrarch’s sonnet the reader can recognize the typical structure of the Italian sonnet.

The first octave introduces the problem creating a comparison between the speaker’s mind and the ship towering in tormented seas at midnight. The skipper is worried by private thoughts that are so sad that it seems not to care even of the terrible weather conditions. He sighs he has desires and hopes. There follows the sestet where his pessimistic, sad moods are repeated, he weeps, he weeps, he regrets his life as well as the conditions of the weather puts his voyage at risk. In the ending tercet the speaker hides his feelings in the same way as he cannot see the stars. He seems unable to use reason and even worse to be able to reach the harbour.

It goes without saying that there is an apparent analogy between poet’s life and the voyage progress. Unfortunately such life doesn’t sound easy but instead unveils difficulties, problems, torments that all together seem to make the poet unable to come up to an autonomous solution of his pains.

QUESTIONS

How the analogy life-voyage is expressed?

The analogy is expressed comparing the ship to poet’s soul voyaging in a sea (the life) full of dangers and temptations. The soul is slave of feeling and  tries unsuccessfully  to escape from the storm that would destroy it.

What do the weather conditions represent?

Weather conditions represent poet’s feelings and torments. In fact in the poem the terrible weather conditions are the transposition poet’s mood. In fact he describes the wind as a concentration of feelings (sadness, hopes and desires) and the rain as weeping.

How can the reader understand the real argument of the poem?

The reader can understand it first reading accurately the poem. Petrarch describes the voyage of a ship in a tempested and dangerous sea. The ship is under the control of his lord and of his foul thoughts which control the oars, defying the tempest and taking the ship to destruction. So the poet with the metaphor of the ship wants to describe his life, brought to destruction by his foul thoughts and by the feeling that governs his soul and he can’t stop.