116, “The Relic,” and Amoretti sonnets 75 and 79, “Meditation 17,” and Holy Sonnets 10 and 14. “To His Coy Mistress,” “Corrina’s Going A-Maying,” and “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” used this theme to justify their sexual desires to the reader. Many works of this period used terms familiar
advent of the printing press and the patronage of the nobility. Beginning with Petrarch’s popularization of the Italian form, the sonnet became the English mainstay for portrayals of love. The progression of the Renaissance saw the experience of love detailed in many different ways through form, allegory, allusion, and metaphor. The fashioning of the love object in sonnets varies from writer to writer and progresses from an outward, ethereal love to an inward love, rooted in reality as the centuries