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Circles and Labyrinths

by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

Mary Wroth’s “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love” is a corona of sonnets, each starting with the last line of the previous poem. As well as being formally circular, it is also about the cyclical, entrapping experience of love, and features a famous image of a labyrinth, used originally by Petrarch. While Pulter’s “The Circle [2]” is in couplet rhyme, its fourteen-line length may allude to sonnet form.

Lady Mary Wroth
A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love
  • In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?
  • Ways are on all sides while the way I miss;
  • If to the right hand, there in love I burn;
  • Let me go forward, therein danger is;
  • If to the left, suspicion hinders bliss,
  • Let me turn back, shame cries I ought return
  • Nor faint, though crosses which my fortunes kiss;
  • Stand still is harder, although sure to mourn.
  • Thus let me take the right, or left hand way;
  • Go forward, or stand still, or back retire;
  • I must these doubts endure without allay
  • Or help, but travel find for my best hire;
  • Yet that which most my troubled sense doth move
  • Is to leave all, and take the thread of love.
Lady Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Paul Salzman ed., Mary Wroth’s Poetry: An Electronic Edition.