Love that doth reign and live within my thought

- Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)

This sonnet is a translation of one by Petrarch and thus adopts the Petrachan sonnet structure of an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet. It is one of two English translations undertaken during the Renaissance; the other, by Sir Thomas Wyatt uses the Petrachan rhyme scheme abbaabbafor the octave while Howard uses the English rhyme scheme ababcdcd, showing that the influence of the Italian sonnet was not uniform.

Follow this link for more background information on the emergence of the Petrachan sonnet form in England during the Renaissance.

Follow this link for more detailed information on the Petrachan sonnet.

Petrach's poetry dealt with the unrequited love of a male speaker for a beloved woman. This sonnet follows that tradition, depicting a speaker who declares his love to a woman only to offend her and see his love 'converteth straight to ire'.

Howard uses the imagery associated with the tradition of courtly love by mixing the semantic fields of love (love, breast, desire, grace, heart, sweet) and war (reign, captive, fought, banner, ire, death). The extended metaphor employed throughout the poem is the personification of love as a knight or warrior who, faced with the disdain of the beloved, turns coward and flees. The effect is humorous but also induces pathos; the speaker's attempt to distance himself from the events by using the conceit of love personified is easy to see through and the final two lines suggest that the speaker, rather than denying that he is guilty of love, which he did in the previous line, accepts responsibility for the fate of Love and even sees dying for love as desirable or 'sweet'.