Carpe diem!

Carpe diem! Seize the day! The motto of Renaissance England, where life was too short too waste even a minute.

Now we're in the Golden Age of English literature-one of the richest periods of time for the art in England. After years of religious unrest during Henry VIII's reign and the ensuing short reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, the long reign of Elizabeth I and her love of poetry and drama was an ideal environment for the likes of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and, of course, William Shakespeare to blossom.

The Renaissance, a cultural rather than political movement, had started in Italy over a century previously. Chaucer had started to bring French and Italian literary styles to England, and this increased in Elizabeth's time. The notion of love, courtly and divine, was being dealt with more widely in English poetry. The Italian sonnet of Petrarch- a 14-line poem with intricate rhyme schemes devoted entirely to the subject of the unrequited love of a melancholy lover for his lady- was popular with English poets such as Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare.

This week we read two such sonnets: the first, a sonnet in a sequence called "Astrophil and Stella" by Philip Sidney, who discovers he was looking in the wrong place for insipiration for his poetry - "'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write'";

the second, a sonnet from the sequence "Amoretti" written by Edmund Spencer describing the courtship of his wife: "My verse your virtues rare shall eternise, And in the heavens write your glorious name."

The idea of immortalising ladies through poetry was common in the period, as we shall see with Shakespeare later.