Assessed work one

Assessed work one
Texts for comparison: Petrarch’s Amor, che nel penser mio; Wyatt’s and Surrey’s versions of the same.
The poem Amor che nel penser mio, as well as its translations, is centred on the idea that love is a potentially aggressive fighter who conquers the poet’s speaker and reveals himself to the object of his affection, only for the beloved woman to reject him. He flees and hides as a result, thus leaving the poet to contemplate the reality of being subservient to a ‘cowardly’ master. Though Wyatt’s and Surrey’s translations are generally faithful to Petrarch’s original in terms of the overall theme and structure, there are enough variations in each of them for them to be considered works in their own right.
Differences amongst the poems begin to emerge in the very first line. Petrarch’s Love ‘vive et regna’; Surrey’s equally “doth reign and live”; however, Wyatt’s simply “doth harbour”. Where Surrey strictly adheres to the original poem, Wyatt adapts it slightly. He also refers to it as “long”, which is, to some extent, a form of compensation for his deviation. Even though his notion of love doesn’t reign, he essentially characterises it as an ever-present emotion. Aurally, this is reinforced by the alliteration formed by the words “long love”. Line two is noteworthy for Surrey as he adds a further dimension to the poem: time. While Petrarch and Wyatt speak in the present, Surrey makes reference to the past, which, in some form, is parallel to Wyatt’s use of “long” in the previous line, since it offers the idea of Love’s continuous presence. Throughout the poem, Surrey employs the past, present and future tenses, giving a strict point of reference from which to read and understand the sonnet. By using the word “Oft”...

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...nnet contain enough original elements for them to be considered poems in their own right. Since Wyatt introduced the Petrarchan sonnet to the English language, it is understandable that he met various shortcomings in terms of the sonnet’s form, rhythm and rhyme scheme. Surrey, on the other hand, exhibits iambic pentameter, a clean rhyme scheme and a successful transposition into the English sonnet form. Nevertheless, what Surrey attains from this could be considered futile due to all the simplifications from Petrarch’s original that could obscure the meaning of the poem. Here is where Wyatt seems to excel, for he not only successfully reincarnates Petrarch’s intentions, but he also exceeds them in some instances. For this reason, it can be said that Wyatt gives the best translation, although there are undoubtedly many who would prefer Surrey’s as a stand-alone poem.