Language and Imagery

Abstract

The close affinity between much of the poetry of Romeo and Juliet and the highly wrought artifice of the Petrarchan sonnet can best be illustrated by a brief extract:

Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love. Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate, O anything of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health Still-waking sleep that is not what it is!

(I i 175–81)