Milli mála - 2021, Síða 205
204 Milli mála 13/2021
modern culture.80 Writing is a form of forging the poet’s (true)
breath. But in accusing Fletcher of “fain[ing] those sighes, that no
where can be found,” Licia not only insists that they lack a definable
location. She also frames their destruction as a comparable denial of
space: “Both your attempts, deserve no better roome, / Thus at her
word, we ashes both became.” A deterritorialized phenomenon,
sighs have no right to a place and can only be represented by emp-
tiness. The obvious pun on stanza (Italian, “room”), moreover,
implicates Fletcher’s own sonnet in the process of disappearance.81
To be actualized as a sigh-based lyric poem, the sonnet must forfeit
its spatial position on the page.
Echoing these concerns, sonnet LI from Barnabe Barnes’s
Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593) examines them through the lens
of print technology:
Lame consonants, of member-vowells robbed
What perfect-sounding wordes can you compose
Wherein you might my sorrowes flame disclose?
Can you frame mamed wordes as you had throbbed?
Can you with sighes make signes of passions sobbed?
Or can your characters make sorrowes showes?
Can liquids make them? I with tears make those,
But for my teares with taunts and frumps are bobbed:
Could mutes procure good wordes mute would I bee,
But then who should my sorrowes image paint?
No consonants or mutes or liquids will
Set out my sorrowes, tho with grief I faint:
If with no letter but one vowell should bee,
An A. with H. my Sonnet would fulfill.82
The sonnet stages an experiment in which the lover tests the affor-
dances of different kinds of consonant as he searches for the “per-
fect-sounding wordes.” None, however, pleases Parthenophil, for
80 See L. Knight, Reading Green, 53.
81 Samuel Daniel describes stanzaic organization, specifically the sonnet form, as “much excellently
ordered in a small room” (Defence of Rhyme, 216).
82 Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Eiijr–v
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8