“I LONG TO STRIDE BEHIND MY LORD”: THE YEARNING VOICE IN VITTORIA COLONNA’S SONNETS

Vittoria Colonna’s selected sonnets explore the sacred-profane dichotomy through the tension between earthly and divine forms of love. Colonna acknowledges that even though she maintains a strong faith, spiritual purity can be unattainable due to earthbound concerns. The contradictory feelings of holding a privileged position in the material world and longing for the eternal are poeticised with the clash between the earthly and the supernatural in Colonna’s poetry. The analysis of the selected sonnets intends to highlight the poet’s conflicting voices and personas as both a courtly woman and a devout follower of Christ. This study, therefore, focuses on Colonna’s selected sonnets to illustrate how the poet uses imagery to contrast the notion of faith and ‘false’ desires from an Aristotelian perspective. A close reading of the poems reveals Colonna’s literary complexity and the poet’s religious attitude in creating the sonnets for Christ during a time when the profane challenged the sacred. The study concludes that Colonna’s sonnets transcend personal expression in a didactic manner by constructing a space for hope, potentially offering solace not only to Colonna but to others as well.