In this sonnet, the speaker mourns the death of his beloved Laura, whom he variously describes as "my dear" and "my Laura." It is clear this was no idle fancy between them—the speaker is so moved by the loss of his love that he is thinking already of the future in which he, too, will die and she will be reunited with him again in heaven. He is "sick" of being alive without her and writes this poem in the hope that his rhymes will travel to her and convey this information. He asks that the words should tell her he is distracted from everything he should be doing in his life because he can do nothing but think about his grief over her, and spends all his time praising her and lamenting her passing.
The speaker, then, we can understand to have been completely enamored with Laura and subsequently completely devastated by her death, sufficiently that it has proven a distraction from absolutely everything else in his life and sent him into a depression.
In Petrarch's Sonnet 333, the speaker's relationship to
Laura is that she was his love, but now she has
passed away. We see evidence that she was both dearly loved by the
speaker and is now deceased in the very first stanza in which he says,"Go,
grieving rimes[rhymes] of mine, to that hard stone / Whereunder lies my
darling, lies my dear" (1-2). Since gravestones are ornamental stones set on
top of graves, we know that the "stone" his "darling" is lying under is indeed
a gravestone; therefore, we know that Laura is deceased. Not only that, the
phrase "lies my darling, lies my dear" is very telling in that the terms
"darling" and "dear" are well-known terms of endearment used to express
affection for a "dearly loved" one (Random House Dictionary). Thus, through
these two terms alone we can tell that Laura was a woman who meant a great deal
to the speaker, one he loved romantically.
We can further see just how much Laura meant to the speaker
when he says that he can no longer live without her, that his grief over her
loss has made it impossible for him to continue doing in life what he needs to
do, as we see in the lines, "Tell her, I'm sick of living; that I'm blown / By
winds of grief from the course I ought to steer" (5-6). We even learn he feels
his only purpose in life is to praise her and, therefore, without her he wants
to die.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
Further Reading