Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 213
MILLI MÁLA
212 Milli mála 13/2021
each decorated with a floral border. This type of visual organization,
with pages and sonnets uniformly designed and sequentially num-
bered, created “a more stable and fixed artefact than any of its indi-
vidual poems.”99 But cordoning off the spaces of individual sonnets
also opened possibilities for detachment and fragmentation. This
becomes more pronounced if we consider sequences that run poetry
through from page to page, occasionally breaking the sonnets mid-
way (quartos of Astrophil and Stella, Barnes’ Parthenophil,
Shakespeare’s Sonnets). There, while rifts within individual poems
become possible, the continuity among the sonnets increases.100 By
the same token, the borders of floral design at the top and at the
bottom of each page dispatch confusing messages. Such flowers
were often used to “articulate the composition and identity of the
entire printed volume as something more than the sum of its
parts.”101 But in the Amoretti the upper borders are unstable.
Curiously, the ones sitting on top of sonnets XXIII and XXIV (un-
weaving) do not have identical designs, nor do those of sonnets
XLVIII and XLIX (burning). A purported mechanism of totality,
these flowers sow seeds of disintegration. We may also recall the
re-appearance, almost verbatim, of sonnet XXXV (“My hungry
eyes with greedy couetize”), in which the lover compares himself to
Narcissus, as sonnet LXXXIII. From a technological point of view,
the repetition may suggest that the leaves of the book have been
stitched together erroneously, asking the reader to re-arrange the
volume. But this possible printing error is grafted onto the sonnet’s
Ovidian language of insatiable desire (“so plenty makes me poore”),
producing an allegory of an imperfect poetic object.
In all these instances, the Amoretti strives to bring the indisput-
able facticity of its book-ness in conflict with the imaginative, nu-
merical, and typographic signals it transmits: it suggests, among
other things, that its material and conceptual thresholds may not
coincide, that the order and numbering of the sonnets may be un-
reliable, and that the book may harbour additional endings and
beginnings. This in turn increases the care its readers invest in the
99 Wall, Imprint of Gender, 70–71.
100 See Hutchison, “Breaking the Book.”
101 Fleming, “Changed Opinion,” 56.
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8