Milli mála - 2021, Side 211
MILLI MÁLA
210 Milli mála 13/2021
yet reached the end. Since reading cannot continue until the page
is turned and the following sonnet is revealed, this unknowable
futurity reinforces the notion of LXXXV as potentially the last
poem. (The volume’s full title also suggests that the sonnet collec-
tion—Amoretti—does not exhaust its contents.) Yet this attempt at
finalization is quickly revealed to be a faux ending: four more son-
nets separate it from the final word of the sequence. In turn, the
actual explicit to the sequence—the three final sonnets—defy their
status as the book’s ultimate closure. The last page of the Amoretti
is devoid of any terminal paratext—a ‘The End,’ a ‘FINIS,’ an en-
voy, a colophon, or a visual device—which would signal the end of
a textual unit. Such verbal and visual tools were becoming increas-
ingly common in the late sixteenth century, so their absence can
give the reader reason to expect more.97 In fact, the catchword “In”
promises continuation beyond the page, and the “Anacreontics”
section that follows begins on the next verso page so their different
stanzaic organization cannot yet optically confirm the formal shift
after sonnet LXXXIX. The word FINIS appears eight pages later,
when it separates the “Anacreontics” from the Epithalamion (which
boasts its own title page and its own FINIS propping the poem’s
last stanza).
Moreover, the last sonnets (LXXXVII–LXXXIX), unexpectedly
lamenting the speaker’s separation from the lady, belie their status
as closure. Erotic frustration and pangs of absence are textbook
Petrarchism, but their redeployment toward the end of a work that
articulates a vision of conjugal love is surprising. This carefully
choreographed separation of the lovers, in suspending post-betroth-
al mutuality, disturbs the teleology of the sequence. Instead, the
final poems subtly reprise the opening images of the Amoretti: the
lover hoping to feed his “loue-afamished hart” with the “light” of
“th’Idaea playne” (LXXXVIII) and wanting “liuely bliss” (LXXXIX)
echoes the descriptions of his beloved as his “soules long lacked
foode, [his] heauens bliss” in the opening sonnet. When LXXXVII
has the lover “time with expectation spend,” the Amoretti effec-
tively formulates a new Petrarchan incipit.
97 On “terminal paratexts,” see Sherman, “Beginning.”
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8