Mouzinho's sonnet 40. A Reading in four Stanzas

Abstract

Vasco Mouzinho, an exact contemporary of Shakespeare's, put into print, in his first volume of poetry of 1596, a set of 51 sonnets. Some of these poems have been remarked for the depth of their subjectivity, others for their allegorical conventionality. My reading of number 40 in the series will show, however, that Mouzinho was interested, like Petrarch before him, in articulating those two types of discourse together. A poem about love, sonnet 40 is also an intensely meaningful discussion about the connections between intimate 'feeling' («sentir») and outward 'knowing' («conhecer»), between old emblematic representation and modern writing on the subject, and therefore about the powers and the limits of poetry itself.