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The speaker in Sara Teasdale's Petrarchan sonnet, "To E.," dramatizes her memories of beauty that she treasures, with a special memory of a treasured soul.
The sonnet is similar to a Petrarchan sonnet, with an octave that portrays many things of beauty that she has experienced; then, the sestet turns to the one subject that not only provides her musing with beauty but also offers her peace and comfort. The OctaveThe octave begins, “I have remembered beauty in the night,” and this memory motivates her to remember “black silences I waked to see / A shower of sunlight over Italy.” She remembers the Italian village of Ravello, which leads her musing to what she has heard, “I have remembered music in the dark, / The clean swift brightness of a fugue of Bach's, / And running water singing on the rocks / When once in English woods I heard a lark.” She portrays the many beautiful things she has both seen and heard as she has traveled in Italy and England. These memories are important to her; therefore, she cloaks them in rime and a pleasing meter. The SestetBut as important as these memories are, she finds that “all remembered beauty is no more / Than a vague prelude to the thought of you.” The beauty of all the things portrayed in the octave pale in comparison to the beauty evoked by the “soul” to whom she is dedicating his sonnet, “To E.” (Presumably, her husband Ernst Filsinger.) The beautiful things described in the octave are natural phenomena, the “black silences” of night,” the “shower of sunlight over Italy,” and “water singing on the rocks,” and the English lark, but there is also man-made beauty, the city of Ravello and the music of Bach. But the beauty portrayed in the sestet is simply a human soul about whom she asserts, “You are the rarest soul I ever knew.” And this soul is rare because of his own love of beauty, which the speaker admires as “knightliest and best.” The final two lines of the sestet dramatize the speaker’s thoughts through the simile, “as waves that seek the shore”; her thoughts search out this fellow soul, this lover of beauty on their own, as naturally as the ocean waves that constantly run to the ocean’s shore. But unlike the waves that continuously crash against the shore, when the speaker’s thoughts flow over this rare soul, she finds tranquility: “And when I think of you, I am at rest.” Petrarchan SonnetThe rime scheme of the octave is ABBACDDC, and the rime scheme of the sestet is EFFGEG. The Petrarchan sonnet may have various rime schemes. As in the traditional Petrarchan sonnet, Teasdale’s “To E.” fulfills different duties in the octave and the sestet. The octave traditionally sets up a problem that the sestet solves. In the Teasdale sonnet, the octave offers a catalogue of beautiful things that the speaker’s memory holds and treasures, but the sestet then dramatizes how these memories fade when the memory of this special soul comes into view.
The copyright of the article Sara Teasdale’s ‘To E.’ in American Poetry is owned by Linda Sue Grimes. Permission to republish Sara Teasdale’s ‘To E.’ in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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