Carrying the Torch

By Steven Payne

When I want to read a book, I write one. So wrote the 19th century politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli - Washington Irving said something very similar - and its a maxim which Ive adopted as my own. Almost all of the writing Ive done over many years has been based on wanting to read a book on a particular subject - a book which research told me didnt currently seem to exist. Carrying the Torch, like all my other books to date, was born out of the desire to read a good book on an interesting subject: finding nothing available that quite matched up to my expectations, I decided to write it myself. I wanted a good, general book about the phenomenon of unrequited love in the worlds art, how important a theme it has been in novels, poems, music and film for so long, why artists keep coming back to it again and again, what it actually is, what it feels like and how it might be explained and so forth. I like to think that thats the book Ive written. All the world loves a lover and most people, whether they openly admit it or not (and that includes a great many men!) love a good love story: as I make clear in the book, it doesnt seem to matter if the story has a tragic or at least unhappy ending, we dont enjoy it any less and may even enjoy it all the more, as the popularity of weepies in book or film form attests.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Dec 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456835125

Steven Payne

I was born in 1972 and with one relatively brief exception I have lived all my life in my home county of Leicestershire. I have written from a very early age, although it took me almost until the age of forty to get into print! When not writing I enjoy reading, cooking and walking.

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Copyright © 2011 by Steven Payne.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4568-3511-8

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4568-3512-5

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Cover Image: Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840): Ruins of the Oybin Monastery (c. 1835): oil on canvas 27 x 21 cm (10 5/8 x 8 1/4in.): State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Contents

Part One

Carrying the Torch

Part Two

Chapter One

A Complete Conquest:

The Sorrows of Young Goethe

Chapter Two

The Book of Love:

William Hazlitt and Sarah Walker

Chapter Three

A Home in Mary’s Smile:

John Clare and Mary Joyce

Chapter Four

The land of lost content:

A.E. Housman and Moses Jackson

Chapter Five

The troubling of my life began:

W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne

Notes

Bibliography

for B.J.T.

in quella parte, dove sta memora

From the first day I met her, she was the only woman to me . . . It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Abbey Grange

Part One

Carrying the Torch

I

A mighty pain to love it is,

   And ’tis a pain that pain to miss;

But of all the pains, the greatest pain

   Is to love, but love in vain.

Abraham Cowley

Donde hay amor, hay dolor.

Where there is love, there is pain.

Spanish proverb

On the morning of Monday the 15th of July 1974 Christine Chubbuck, a twenty-nine year-old television presenter with WXLT-TV in Sarasota on the south-western coast of Florida, surprised her colleagues at the station by saying that she had to read a newscast to open her regular Channel 40 programme, Suncoast Digest, which she had hosted for more than a year.¹ This was unusual as it was something she had rarely done before: Suncoast Digest was more in the nature of a talk-show which usually opened with Christine interviewing various local figures. In the first eight minutes of the programme, which began as normal at 9.30am, Christine covered three national stories and then a local item about a shooting in a restaurant. As she spoke Christine was, unknown to anyone but herself, keeping a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver loaded with wadcutter bullets in a shopping bag beneath the newsdesk. Technical difficulties meant that the film reel of the restaurant shooting broke down, at which point Christine stared directly into the camera and said calmly: In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living colour, you are going to see another first—attempted suicide. Christine Chubbuck pulled out the revolver, placed the muzzle behind her right ear and, in front of hundreds if not thousands, shot herself in the head. The camera quickly panned away and the picture was faded to black before the station ran a public service announcement and then a movie, but not quickly enough to prevent many viewers seeing Christine Chubbuck slump forward and, according to eyewitness reports, hear her head hit the desk with a louder report than the gunshot. Calls flooded in to the station, many of them from members of the public thinking that the act was some kind of hoax or sick joke. It was neither. Christine Chubbock had just shot herself on live television.

Christine was actually still alive—barely. She was rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital where she was administered oxygen but by seven o’clock that evening doctors told her family who were keeping a vigil at her bedside that they did not expect her to survive. She was pronounced dead at a quarter past eleven. Her funeral was held on the 18th of July on Siesta Key beach, attended by 120 people. She was cremated: a keen scuba diver and lover of the ocean, her ashes were taken out to sea to be scattered in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the general dazed shock and grief that ensued further information about Christine Chubbuck’s life, state of mind and intentions became known. Three weeks prior to her death Christine had asked WXLT-TV’s news director if she could do a piece on suicide. With permission granted she visited the local sheriff’s department and spoke at length to an officer about various methods of committing suicide. The officer innocently revealed that the one almost guaranteed method of successfully shooting oneself in the head was to use a .38 calibre revolver with lead wadcutter bullets which fragment on impact and to place the barrel of the gun behind the right ear, firing into the hind-brain where the heart and lungs functions are housed and not at the temple where on rare occasions the bullet can be deflected by the skull and cause only serious brain damage rather than death. Two weeks later, a week before her televised suicide, she had told the night news editor of the station that she had bought a gun and joked about committing suicide live on air. I had this really nifty idea, she had said. I thought I’d bring it in to work and blow myself away during my talk show. The editor, Rob Smith, later told a newspaper that hadn’t found the scenario at all funny and chided her for her ‘joke.’ She was always joking around, saying weird things, Smith remembered. I thought at the time it was just a bad joke. After her suicide attempt it was discovered that Christine had written a complete script of her final programme including a third person account of her own on-air suicide, presumably to be read by whichever member of staff took over. The script was chillingly prescient: it stated that she had been, or would be, taken to Sarasota Memorial Hospital—which she was—and that her condition had been/would be described as critical. This was also true.

Work colleagues were complimentary, describing her as talented, energetic, dedicated and enthusiastic. She was a very nice girl, said one,  . . . an easy person to get along with and . . . just like one of the guys. No one at WXLT-TV seems to have noticed anything untoward. I talked with her over the weekend about an assignment and never noticed anything wrong. She seemed happy. Her job meant very much to her. She felt very strongly about being first with the news. Another colleague described her as extremely hardworking and the sparkplug of the office. In her spare time Christine volunteered at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital—where she would die—entertaining mentally handicapped children with hand-made puppet shows. But a very different picture was painted by Christine’s shocked family, a sad portrait of a kind but hypersensitive and tormented woman whose professionalism at work had evidently been a mask for deep and desperate unhappiness. Christine Chubbuck, it became clear, was someone whose constant self-deprecation and self-criticism hid a deep and intractable depression and suicidal tendencies. Born in Hudson, Ohio in August 1944 Christine had been a highly intelligent student at school and later at Boston University where she earned a degree in broadcasting. She worked in public television in Pennsylvania and her native Ohio before moving to Florida in 1967. She had worked as a hospital computer operator for several years before returning to her first love of broadcasting. It became clear, though, Christine had always had serious problems with self-esteem and depression: even at school in Cleveland, Ohio she had formed a small group called the ‘Dateless Wonders Club.’ A former roommate described her as a wonderful person, very brilliant, but never terribly happy. Though slim, dark-haired and generally considered highly attractive, Christine’s personality problems meant that many found her brittle and unapproachable. It seemed that she simultaneously wanted the company of other people but pulled away again as soon as they became too close for her comfort, desiring closeness and companionship but becoming brusque and defensive when she seemed on the verge of attaining it. She seemed to have few if any really close friends. The focus of Christine’s personal life was her family: she lived in Siesta Key with her divorced mother, brother Tim and her poodle.

Christine, it transpired, had a history of mental health issues and had battled severe depression for several years. In 1970 she had attempted suicide by taking an overdose: she had been seeing a psychiatrist until just a few weeks before her eventual suicide. The local Sheriff said that she had left behind a suicide note but would not disclose its contents. She had also had physical health problems: a year before her death she had had an ovary removed and had been told by doctors that unless she became pregnant within a year or two it would highly unlikely that she would ever be able to have children. Christine’s mother Margretha (known as Peg) was clear that although there had been no specific problems in the weeks leading up to her daughter’s death, her personal life was directly responsible. Mrs Chubbuck revealed that her daughter was in great personal turmoil over the fact that at twenty-nine she was still a virgin. She was terribly, terribly, terribly depressed, she said.

She had a job that she loved. She said constantly that if it ended tomorrow she would still be glad she had it. But she had nothing else in her social life. No close friends, no romantic attachments or prospects of any. She was a spinster at 29 and it bothered her. She couldn’t register with people. That’s the main thing. She was very sensitive and she tried, she would reach out, you know . . . She’d been very depressed. She’d been seeing a psychiatrist who really didn’t feel that she was serious about not wanting to live. She felt that if you’ve tried as hard as you can . . . you reach your hand out to people and nobody takes it, then there’s something wrong with your drumbeat, and she really felt she couldn’t register with anyone except her family. And at 29, that’s sad . . . She often referred to herself as someone who still believed in wine and roses, being sent flowers and called up for a date. But she would go through periods of two or three years where nobody would even ask her out for a hot dog. You’ve got to learn to crawl before you walk and Chris never even had a crawling relationship with anybody. She never had more than two dates with anyone in her life . . . I don’t think Chris had more than 25 dates in the last ten years . . . She really wanted to find someone to love and to get married. It was much more important to her than her job. She used to say that even a bad relationship is better than none. Her 30th birthday would have been on August 24th and she would have been officially an old maid. It bothered her like hell . . . There was a haunting melody in Chris. She gave so many presents, spent so much money not to buy their friendship . . . but because she wanted to. It’s almost like her life was a little out of gear with other people. She was the only person I ever knew who would walk into a room and every head would turn . . . yet nobody ever came over and asked for her phone number. It’s been like that since she was 13.

Perhaps saddest of all it later transpired that Christine had nursed an unrequited love for a work colleague, the handsome (so much so that he was known as ‘Gorgeous George’), blond-haired divorced George Peter Ryan. Christine had baked a special cake for Ryan’s 30th birthday and made her romantic interest known to him: to a friend she had confided that she thought George was the perfect person to help her with her problems in life. But Ryan rejected her advances: he was already romantically involved with a mutual colleague, sports reporter Andrea Kirby—who just happened to be the closest thing to a best friend that Christine had and who had just accepted a job which would take her to Baltimore, which further deepened Christine’s despair. When Chris found out that George and I were going out, that depressed her, Kirby said. I think she wanted marriage and children more than anything else. She said to me once, ‘I would like to have, just for one week, somebody I really loved, who really loved me’. Christine Chubbuck never got her wish.

II

One could make a good case for saying that love is the single dominant theme in the art and culture of the world. West and East alike, from the highest of high art to the lowliest manifestations of popular culture, the universality of the experience means that celebrating the joys of romance stands out far above anything and everything else—politics, war, God, religion, even death.

The joys, but also the pains. A love story seems to be one of the very few areas, perhaps the only area, of human activity where an unhappy ending is not necessarily viewed as something that detracts from enjoying an artistic depiction of the experience. Doom, gloom, death and disaster are seen as uniformly negative in any other area but the tragic love story continues to appeal seemingly every bit as much as the successful: witness the classic status of motion pictures with unhappy endings such as Casablanca, Brief Encounter and Gone With the Wind (which last, incidentally, contains the theme of Scarlett O’Hara’s unrequited love for Ashley Wilkes) and, more recently, Cinema Paradiso, a film not only about time, memory, age, nostalgia and the power of the past but Salvatore’s thirty-year unrequited love for Elena. Romantic relationships which end badly as well as happily continue to appeal to huge numbers of us in the novels we read, the films we watch and the music we listen to, perhaps because at the very least they remind us that we are not suffering alone. And the one form of especially unhappy romance which has engaged writers, poets, film makers and composers down the ages is unrequited love.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb ‘to requite’ as to repay, make return for, reward; to repay with the like. Unrequited love (a phrase which according to Gregory Dart entered the English language around 1542 with Sir Thomas Wyatt’s sonnet ‘Complaint for True Love Unrequited’²) is therefore unreturned love, love felt by one person which is either not reciprocated by the object of their adoration even though reciprocation is very strongly desired (‘classic’ unrequited love, we can perhaps label it) or it may be reciprocated emotionally but frustrated or prevented for one reason or another which may better deserve the label of ‘star-crossed’ love of which examples abound in the world’s art and culture, Romeo and Juliet being the prime example in the West. In some cases such love is not even known about by its object: it is not essential to the definition of unrequited love that one person necessarily always knows that they are loved by another. In the words of psychologists Roy F. Baumeister and Sara R. Wotman in Breaking Hearts: The Two Sides of Unrequited Love (discussed in more detail below):

Unrequited love is a relationship that fails to form. One person wants a romantic attachment . . . in our society that means a high degree of intimacy, physical and sexual expression (although not necessarily involving a full range of sexual activities), and some mutual commitment to reserve certain parts of one’s life and one’s psyche to be shared only with one’s beloved. The other person does not want this. Unrequited love is thus a rejection of an opportunity, an invitation, for romantic attachment . . . One of life’s marvels is the capacity of two people to be overcome with passionate longing for each other, a state that is often characterized by bliss, intimacy, physical desire, and mutual fascination. Passionate love has taken its place as one of our culture’s supreme ideals of human fulfillment. Often, however, the passionate longing strikes only one member of the pair, while the other is decidedly uninterested in the experience of mutuality so ardently desired by the would-be lover. Such unrequited love has become recognized by our culture as a common cause of great anguish.³

Just how much anguish it can truly cause will be become all too apparent.

Unrequited love is surely as old as love itself. In the West some of its earliest appearances are to be found in ancient Greek myths such as the tale of Echo and Narcissus, one version of which is to be found in Ovid’s classic Metamorphoses. The Oread or mountain nymph Echo is in the forest one day when she sees the beautiful but proud, vain and dismissive youth Narcissus with whom Echo instantly falls desperately in love. When Narcissus hears Echo’s footsteps he calls out Who is there? Echo can only repeat the calls of Narcissus word for word until, finally, she breaks cover and rushes toward Narcissus, hoping to embrace him. Narcissus however curtly rebuffs Echo’s longing advances and after Narcissus leaves her, a heartbroken Echo pines away by degrees, slowly and sadly fading away and crying until only her voice remains. As a punishment for his coldness Narcissus is condemned by Venus, the goddess of love in the Roman version of the myth, to fall insanely in love with the very next person he sees, which in fact happens to be himself when he catches sight of his own reflection in a pool of water. So enamoured is he with his own image that, depending on different versions of the tale, he either pines away and dies by the waterside, falls in and drowns while reaching for his reflection or, realising that his unrequited love is hopeless and can never be fulfilled, stabs himself with his hunting knife, but not before uttering a heart-rending plaint which expresses the perennial anguish of unrequited love: I am in love, and see my loved one, but that form which I see and love, I cannot reach: so far am I deluded by my love . . . Now grief is sapping my strength; little of life remains for me—I am cut off in the flower of my youth. I have no quarrel with death, for in death I shall forget my pain; but I could wish that the object of my love could outlive me: as it is, both of us will perish together, when this one life is destroyed.⁴ The narcissus genus of plants, informally called simply daffodils, sprang from the spot where he lay or where his blood fell. In Ovid’s version the ruin of Narcissus came about when a young maiden—one of many who had fallen in unrequited love with him—prayed to the gods that he would in turn suffer an unreciprocated adoration of his own: May he himself fall in love with another, as we have done with him! May he too be unable to gain his loved one! The prayer was answered by the goddess Nemesis (the goddess of divine retribution) who caused Narcissus to suffer his lonely fate, thus making unrequited love a curse. Irrespective of version, the myth has given rise to the concept of narcissism and to the enduring association of the daffodil as a symbol of unrequited love.

Very similar is the myth of the water nymph Clytie, who was passionately in love with the sun god Apollo. In one version Apollo initially loves Clytie but spurns her for another, Leucothoe: a grieving but furious and bitter Clytie seeks out Leucothoe’s father Orchamus and tells him that his daughter has been defiled. Out of his mind with shame and grief Orchamus has his own daughter buried alive in the ground. This brutal act of vengeance sprang out of Clytie’s desire to remove her love rival and win back Apollo but unsurprisingly it served only to harden his heart against her: now Clytie stood without food or drink for nine days and nights, turning her face in Apollo’s direction as the sun travelled across the sky each day. Finally, at the end of these nine days, she became rooted to the spot and turned into a plant, variously the plants of the heliotrope genus or the sunflower depending on version (heliotropic plants turning their blooms or leaves in the direction of the sun throughout the day). In the words of Ovid:

From that day she wasted away, for she had been quite mad with love. She had no use for the company of the nymphs, but sat upon the bare ground, night and day, under the open sky, her head uncovered, and her hair all disarrayed. For nine days she tasted neither food nor drink, but fed her hunger only on dew and tears. She never stirred from the ground: all she did was to gaze on the face of the sun god as he journeyed on, and turn her own face to follow him. Her limbs, they say, became rooted to the earth, and a wan pallor spread over part of her complexion, as she changed into a bloodless plant . . . Though held fast by its root, this flower still turns to the sun, and although Clytie’s form is altered, her love remains.

Hence the lines by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852):

The heart that has truly loved never forgets,

    But as truly loves on to the close;

As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets

    The same look that she turned when he rose.

The Erotes were a group of winged gods and demi-gods under the dominion of Aphrodite and associated with love and sexual desire. Of those Erotes who were ascribed names Himeros was associated with lust (the name itself means ‘desire’) and unrequited love. First mentioned in the Theogony of Hesiod in the 8th century BC, he was usually depicted as a nude and exceptionally handsome winged youth (sometimes a child) carrying a bow and arrow symbolising the darts of unreturned love he would fire at the unsuspecting. His brother god Anteros by contrast was the god of requited love who avenged unrequited adoration by punishing those who scorned love and rejected the advances of others.

Then there are the tales surrounding the so-called Leucadian leap. Lefkada (or in modern Greek Levkás) is a small Ionian island on the west coast of Greece: at its southern point the steep cliffs of Cape Lefkada rear up two hundred feet from the sea. The leap seems to have had its origin in a primitive religious sacrifice to the god Apollo: every year a criminal was thrown from the cliffs into the sea as a form of trial-by-ordeal, where he would either fall to a watery grave or survive and be picked up by the boats waiting below. Tradition ascribes a connection to unrequited love in the form of a play that the dramatist Menander (c. 342-291 BC) wrote called The Lady from Leukas in which he related the sad (but almost certainly fictional) end of the poetess Sappho of Lesbos (fl. 7th century BC) who, in torment over her unrequited love for a ferryman called Phaon, threw herself to her death from the cliffs, a story of the original lover’s leap taken up centuries later by the Roman poet Ovid in the Heroides. Thereafter a tradition arose that those suffering the tortures of unhappy love would likewise leap from the promontory in a desperate kill-or-cure, sink-or-swim bid either to perish in the sea below or, if they survived, to be cured of their affliction.

In Western literature arguably the archetypical example of unrequited love is to be found in the story of Dante and Beatrice. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265. When he was almost nine years old Dante was taken by his father to the house of Folco dei Portinari, a wealthy and influential banker. He met Folco’s daughter, the eight-year-old Beatrice, and despite his age it was here that he fell in love with her at first sight. Beatrice became and would remain the central love of Dante’s life and his constant muse. Even though they shared the same city and although Dante would haunt certain quarters hoping and expecting to see her again, Dante and Beatrice did not meet again for a further nine whole years, when the teenaged Dante suddenly came across Beatrice in a Florence street accompanied by two older women. Beatrice greeted him with such warmth and grace that when he returned to his home, he fell asleep and had a vision in which the personification of Love itself appeared to him, bearing a sleeping Beatrice in its arms and in one hand holding a flaming object which Love told him was Dante’s own heart. Love awoke Beatrice, at which point she ate Dante’s burning heart.

Dante married Gemma Donati in 1285 and Beatrice married Simone dei Bardi two years later, but Dante’s love for Beatrice was undimmed. Tragedy soon ensued: after only three years of marriage Beatrice died in 1290 at the age of just twenty-four. Nowhere does Dante explain how and why she died: so stunned by grief was he that only the bare fact of her demise could be recorded. This seems to have been the spur which compelled Dante to begin his earliest masterpiece, the quasi-autobiography-cum-poetic treatise La Vita Nuova (‘The New Life’), collecting a number of his poems to date about Beatrice interspersed with a running commentary about the circumstances which gave rise to each poem and explaining its contents.

Some sources have intimated that Dante was so overpowered by despair at Beatrice’s early death that he contemplated suicide, but the desire to write about her coupled with a vision of Beatrice waiting for him in heaven saved him. The Vita Nuova ends with a brief mention of the vision Dante experienced:

. . . there appeared to me a miraculous vision in which I saw things that made me resolve to say no more about this blessed one until I would be capable of writing about her in a more worthy fashion. And to achieve this I am striving as hard as I can, and this she truly knows. Accordingly, if it be the wish of Him through whom all things flourish that my life continue for a few more years, I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman. And then may it please that One who is the Lord of Graciousness that my soul ascend to behold the glory of its lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice.⁵

"The most extraordinary feature of Dante’s The New Life, writes the clinical psychologist Frank Tallis, is the degree to which he idealises Beatrice. Until Dante, almost all love poetry—however heady—recognised that beauty fades. In the end, time must ruin even the loveliest of faces. Yet, when it comes to Beatrice, Dante simply refuses to concede any ground to time . . . in the reliquary of Dante’s imagination, Beatrice’s incorruptible body parts were preserved like those of a mediaeval saint."⁶

Dante’s life did continue for a few more years, long enough for him to compose his masterpiece, the Commedia.*, the epic allegorical poem describing Dante’s vision of being guided through the Christian conception of the afterlife, from Hell to Purgatory to Paradise. In Hell and Purgatory Dante is guided by the Latin poet Virgil, but as a pagan Virgil is unable to enter a Christian heaven and therefore at the end of the Purgatorio Dante meets Beatrice who guides him through Paradise all the way to the Beatific Vision of God Himself—where language breaks off and Dante’s poem comes to an end.

How much the real Dante knew of or about the real Beatrice is still a matter of scholarly dispute. There is almost no historical evidence of Beatrice’s life at all. There is little doubt that the Vita Nuova blends fact with fiction to serve artistic ends. There is even less doubt that their relationship, such as it was, was almost entirely one-sided and based at most on scarcely more than a few very brief encounters. With so little in the way of actual personal contact to go on, Dante’s relationship with Beatrice was largely his own creation: he referred to her as la gloriosa donna della mia mente, that is, ‘the glorious lady of my mind.’ Even so, how much Beatrice meant to Dante can be discerned by the fact that he made her the central figure in his two greatest works, the Vita Nuova and the Commedia.

If Dante remains the greatest poet of Italy’s golden age of mediaeval literature, Francisco Petrarca, better known as Petrarch (1304-1374), is certainly the second greatest. On the 6th of April 1327—Good Friday—the twenty three-year old Petrarch caught a glimpse in the church of Saint-Claire d’Avignon of the woman he would immortalise as Laura, then just seventeen years old. Because there is practically no information about Laura in Petrarch’s poetry some authorities have held that Laura was simply an idealised character, a symbolic ur-woman that the poet used on which to hang his verses. Most have taken the opposite view that Petrarch’s Laura was indeed real, most probably Laura de Noves (1310-1348), wife of Count Hugues de Sade (a distant ancestor of the Marquis de Sade) about whom very little is known beyond that she was beautiful, gracious and demure, that she was married at the age of fifteen and raised a large family before her life was cut cruelly short at the age of thirty-eight, dying (some sources claim of plague, others of tuberculosis) on Good Friday 1348—exactly twenty-one years to the day after Petrarch first set eyes upon her. It is not even certain that Petrarch and Laura had any direct personal contact: as with Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch’s adoration was one-sided and conducted from afar, although according to his Secretum (his ‘Secret Book,’ an imaginary dialogue with St Augustine) Petrarch confessed that his romantic ardour was rejected by Laura because she was already a married woman. Nevertheless over a period of forty years Petrarch wrote 366 poems, the majority of them sonnets in the form which has ever since borne Petrarch’s name, in direct and demotic Italian (then considered somewhat vulgar and unfitted for serious poetry) rather than scholarly Latin. Petrarch himself called his poems Rime sparse (or ‘scattered rhymes’) which by later poets were grouped under the title of Il Canzoniere (or ‘songs’: the word ‘sonnet’ comes from the Italian sonnetto