![]() ![]() Smith’s thematic distance from Petrarch is reflected in the form she chose for her sonnets – not the Italian form as employed by Milton, but the English form, with which, however, she often experiments, showing her intention to define a specifically female poetic voice. If Petrarch addresses Laura as a consoler, Smith addresses a series of female entities (Poesy, the Muse, Fancy, the moon, nature), but unlike Laura, none of these can offer either shelter or relief to the poetic subject. This precise goal, by contrast, is missing in Smith’s Sonnets where, by contrast, she presents herself as a wanderer, a pilgrim, and an exile looking for a path that constantly eludes her. ![]() is waiting for him in Heaven, thus giving a precise goal to his wandering as an exile on earth. After her death, Laura appears to Petrarch to tell him that she. She translates Petrarch’s sonnets in a free way, transforming them into a micro-text within the macro-text of her sequence, where she concentrates the love-story between Petrarch and Laura, subtly humanizing the latter and evoking a requited feeling of love on her part. ![]() Four of her Elegiac Sonnets are translations from Petrarch ( Canzoniere 145, 90, 279, and 301, rendered as Elegiac Sonnets 13–16). ![]() Charlotte Smith was one of the first poets who retranslated Petrarch into English, after the blooming of the Petrarchan sonnet sequences in the Renaissance period. ![]()
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