Jesus Gil

Mr. Hedgepeth
AP English Literature 7-8
Block 6
13 October 2015
Renaissance Test Rewrite
Love can last and love can end. Like a scale it can tip into either nourishment or
destruction. These two sides of love's mark are expressed by Petrarch's Sonnet 292 and Donne's
A Valediction of Forbidding Mourning. The two poets establish their takes on eternal love;
Petrarch displaying that it can damn a person and Donne saying that it can expand beyond
bounds. Petrarch utilizes a range of phonaesthetics and a volta to present his case. Donne, on the
other hand, uses a paradoxical simile and a conceit to emphasize his view.
Petrarch embellishes his lost, unrequited lover in the octave with euphemistic descriptions
that make her sound nearly divine and then simply and seriously says that it's all gone. This rise
in heavenly and light features allows for the reader to understand his adoration for her. But with
the lines, "that smile that flashed with the angelic rays/ that used to make this earth a paradise,/
are now a little dust, all feeling gone," he's able to convert all the idyllic and light images to a
stark and abandoned reality, thus igniting a pain of loss to his love. This technique allows for

Petrarch to define that love, as much as it could be platonic and eternal, can so easily break a
person down.
The volta and its following statements in Sonnet 292 emphasizes the pain of living when
a lover is lost. By saying "and yet I live, grief and disdain to me," Petrarch furthers the idea that
as he lives he can no longer love her, and so it destroys him inside. In losing her he had lost parts
of himself -- his muse, happiness, and light (as stated in the sestet) -- and so he himself is also
lost. The pain of eternal love to him is that both can not rejoin once the other is gone, so he lives
in agony, forever brooding over the loss.
Donne brings a paradoxical simile into his case of love being boundless in A Valediction
of Forbidding Mourning: though two lovers may be far they are still close. Such as in the sixth
quatrain, "Our souls therefore, which are one,/ Though I must go, endure not yet/ A breach, but
an expansion,/ Like gold to aery thinness beat," Donne brings forth the idea that although the two
must separate, they are still loving as one and their golden love will only expand, not tear. This
simile allows for Donne to fully enclose how love can stay strong even if there is some
separation, whether in life or death. The love described is idyllic and so in saying that it's
inseparable by anything helps Donne in showing that love itself is something so pure it exceeds
to an ethereal and rapturous being.
Donne's permanence of eternal love is further illustrated by the conceit of a compass. In
it, his lover is always at the center of the needle and with it both lovers always find direction to
each other. From lines 25-35, Donne incorporates this conceit first by showing that their
compasses will only point them to each other. He continues onto saying that the compass will
lead them back to each other if they were to ever separate. The conceit benefits Donne in

developing the idea that love knows no bounds because love will always bring the two lovers
back together. Thus, he shows that love stays strong no matter what.
Although the two poets express different poles of eternal love, both speak of it with
genuine and serious tones. From the two poets it can be concluded that each points to a
perspective truth, making the idea of love relative. These two truths presented show that love can
be beautiful beyond limits but the loss of it can be disastrous, and so love is eternally present.
The two poets experienced different encounters which made them create these poems.
Petrarch, who lost the woman he loved to death, never came out of love whereas Donne was
never in it. Petrarch produces a more expressionist sense in his poem and Donne's poem is too
calculated to show that he has ever been in love. These two different experiences further show
how in their opinions, love is either the thing that brings an eternal and phenomenal joy or an
endless and agonizing grief.
The two poets explore eternal love in their own experiences. Petrarch, who has gone
through love, sees eternal love as a curse because he suffers the pain of loss. Donne, who can
only make inferences, believes that love is boundless and forever strong between lovers. Though
these ideas are different, they can be taken as paradoxical truths because of the relativity of love.
Because of this, love can last and love can end.