Melancholic Excess and Poetic Measure in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

• Main Author: Aurélie Griffin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Société d'Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 2014-12-01
• Series: XVII-XVIII
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/1718/397

Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) evokes the persona’s love melancholy as she is faced with her lover’s inconstancy. Pamphilia writes to herself rather than to her lover, trying to find some poetic measure that would contain her melancholy – a disease which was defined by excess. With its fixed boundaries and specific aesthetic codes, the choice of the Neopetrarchan sonnet can be viewed as an attempt to oppose poetic measure and melancholic excess. The tension between measure and excess appears in the very structure of Wroth’s work, especially in the corona, which might appear as a triumph of measure as opposed to excess, since the last line repeats the first – except that it repeats the persona’s predicament. Wavering between measure and excess, Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence illustrates her aporetic vision of melancholy, which appears as the source of poetic creation, but cannot be relieved by writing.