unattainable love

Within the sonnets written by Spenser and Wyatt, there is something called unattainable love. The poet Petrarch first used this in one of his sonnets. Unattainable love is a love that a person cannot have for a particular reason. This love is very strong between the two people, yet they cannot be with each other because of this particular reason. In Edmund Spenser’s “Sonnet 75” and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Farewell Love”, unattainable love can …

…doest in vain assay, A mortal thing so to immortalize, For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wiped out likewise.” “Not so,” quod I, “let baser things devise To die in dust, but you ahall live by fame: My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, And in the heavens write your glorious name. Where whenas death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.”