Fifteen sonnets of PetrarchFrancesco PetrarcaOmniClassics · Literature
Fifteen sonnets of Petrarch
Francesco PetrarcaA small bilingual selection follows the lyric speaker through desire, memory, grief, and reflection on his own poetic life.
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About the book
Thomas Wentworth Higginson introduces and translates fifteen sonnets by Petrarch, placing the Italian texts alongside their English versions. The selection moves through the changing pressures of love rather than presenting a continuous biographical narrative. Landscape, remembered appearances, inward argument, and the passage of time become ways of measuring a feeling that refuses to remain simple. The compact form concentrates those changes: an image or turn of thought can redirect the entire poem. Higginson's introduction also offers a later reader's personal encounter with Petrarch, making the volume a meeting between two literary moments. Readers need not know Italian to appreciate the selection, though the paired texts make the translator's choices of sound, movement, and emphasis available for close comparison.
- Love and time
- Memory
- The lyric voice
Why read it
For a manageable introduction to Petrarch's sonnets with original and translated texts available for attentive comparison.
Fifteen Italian sonnets with English translations by Thomas Wentworth Higginson