Summary
Sonnet 77 begins with a question. Stranded in a labyrinth, the speaker asks which direction she should take. However, she isn’t exactly worried about choosing the right route. Instead, she expresses concern that despite her many options within the labyrinth, none of the “ways” is the right one. In one direction, she will burn with the pain of love. In another direction, she will meet with some mysterious danger.
Moving into the second stanza, Wroth continues to detail the perils the speaker faces. To the left, she will encounter a love marred by suspicion and jealousy. If she turns back, deserting her lover, her shame will force her back to where she was. Even if she faints, or remains where she is in defiance of the crosses (intersections) that tease her with an impossible decision, she will be out of luck. Doing nothing will not only be difficult, but also lead to grief.
In the third stanza, she reaches a decision. Having determined that it is impossible for her to select the one right way out of all of her options, she instead chooses to take every path. All are equally difficult, so she must submit to eventually taking both the left- and right-hand ways, to wandering the labyrinth. Where she goes doesn’t matter, what matters is that she finds a way to make herself move forward. She must endure the pain of uncertainty as she navigates with neither map nor any outside help, beyond her own ability to endure distress (“travail”).
In the last two lines of the sonnet, the speaker’s focus shifts. The last twelve lines have been concerned with finding the right “way” through the labyrinth. Suddenly, however, she announces that really, she wants to abandon the labyrinth completely. Instead of finding the right “way,” she wants to follow the “thread of love,” wherever it leads her.
Analysis
The speaker’s opening question, “In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn,” also opens up a lot of questions for the reader. We aren’t sure how the speaker got into “this” labyrinth, or what the labyrinth represents. Although the sonnet sequence is dedicated to love, Wroth leaves it up to her reader to determine what exactly symbolizes love in the poem.
Nevertheless, it becomes pretty clear within the first few lines that the speaker isn’t trapped in a physical maze. Instead, the maze represents a feeling of uncertainty around what decisions she should make in her life. The speaker expresses concern that one direction will leave her burning with love, another burdened by shame. These feelings suggest that the speaker believes that every choice she makes will leave her in a state of emotional distress.
One likely interpretation, then, is to view the maze as a symbol of a difficult romantic relationship. No matter what the speaker does, she feels she will end up suffering. Another interpretation is to view the maze as a symbol of love itself. This interpretation poses more problems for us as readers, because the poem ends with the speaker referring to “the thread of love.” This suggests that the thread is love, while the maze symbolizes something else. However, we can actually read the “thread of love” and the labyrinth as symbols of two different modes of love, with subtly different properties.
With this interpretation, the second line of the poem begins to make more sense. In it, Wroth draws a subtle distinction between “ways” and “the way.” The former suggests a model of love with many possible options. The latter, by contrast, describes one singular correct route. It is also reminiscent of Christian theology. Famously, Christ describes himself in the Bible as “the way, the truth, and the light.” When she refers to “the way,” Wroth might be referring to this Christian idea of one true path to salvation. This makes even more sense when we think again about the “thread of love” image. Christ is strongly associated with love in Christian theology, and sometimes even described as a personification of love (see, for example, “Love III” by George Herbert). With the “thread of love,” Wroth gestures towards this association while illustrating the idea of “the way” with the image of a single thread weaving its way through the darkness.
The speaker’s choice at the end of the sonnet can thus be read as a declaration of her preference for Christian salvation over worldly love. Worldly love is confusing, painful, a struggle in the darkness with no good options. By contrast, “the way,” or “the thread of love,” traces out an unmistakable path towards salvation. The beautiful final stanza plays on this choice. Before, the speaker had been struggling to decide how best to move through the maze. But in the final stanza, she announces that “which most my troubled sense doth move / Is to leave all.” Here, “move” refers not to a physical movement, but to an internal stirring, as when we are “moved” by a particularly beautiful piece of music. Ironically, as she tries to force herself to move through the maze, she finds herself most “moved” in a manner that lets her stay entirely still.
This moving, then, seems to answer the speaker’s question from the beginning of the poem. There is no right way to move in the labyrinth, no way to turn that will not end in further distress. Yet, just as she has resigned herself to her fate, the speaker finds not a new possible turn, but rather another way to move. Guided by her “sense,” she can be drawn by the “thread of love,” entering not a new part of the labyrinth, but a new kind of space. This parallels the Christian distinction between worldly and eternal life. For Renaissance Christians, the divine coexisted with the quotidian. Through prayer, and other religious rituals, mortal people could have temporary access to the eternal, infinite, heavenly space inhabited by God. By moving from the labyrinth to the thread of love, the speaker moves also from the trials of daily life, to the eternal certainty of salvation.
This is a neat way to wrap up the poem, but Wroth is a brilliant poet, and her work isn’t ever so simple as to offer only one decisive interpretation. This sonnet is the first in a sequence of sonnets entitled “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love.” In poetry, a crown, or “corona,” is a sonnet sequence in which each poem begins with the last line of the previous poem. The final line of the last poem is the first line of the first poem, completing the circle. This means that the seeming conclusion of this poem is really a new beginning in disguise. Although the next poems in the sequence continue to explore the idea of a pure, divine love, in contrast to a difficult, worldly devotion, they never reach a satisfactory conclusion. Instead, they inevitably return to the first line of this sonnet, the question that opened up so much uncertainty. The final sonnet in the sequence comes from a speaker just as burdened by jealousy, indecision, and burning worldly love as the speaker in the first stanza of this first poem.
The selection of the labyrinth parallels this poetic form. At first, the corona might seem most like the “thread of love”—it follows a single path, each poem dictated by what precedes it. Yet, as we read, we realize that it’s more like the winding path of the labyrinth. Each poem ends unexpectedly, far from where it began. And ultimately, the sequence returns to its beginning, like a wanderer trapped in a maze who somehow finds herself back where she started. Even if the speaker in this first poem seems to choose the simple “thread of love,” she finds herself in a poem that is decidedly maze-like.
