Romantic Love vs Divine Love
Probably the most important theme in Sonnet 77 is the contrast between romantic and divine love. It might be hard to pick up on this if you’re not used to reading Renaissance poetry, but remember that these poems are usually subtly written—they’re almost like puzzles challenging you to figure them out. In this poem, the key is the line “ways are on all sides, while the way I miss.” This odd line suggests a difference between all the possible “ways” in the labyrinth, and something called “the way.” The latter is an allusion to the quote attributed to Jesus, “I am the way, the truth, and the light.” It’s important that none of the ways in the labyrinth are “the way”—to Renaissance Christians, “the way” isn’t just one option to take within life. Instead, it’s an alternative to daily life, with its trivial concerns and the lure of sin.
The final stanza of the poem articulates this paradox again. On the one hand, the speaker, whether she likes it or not, exists within the labyrinth of romantic love, and she has to resign herself to moving within it. Yet she also feels a pull away from the labyrinth: not to escape it, exactly, but to be in a totally different kind of space. That space is “the thread of love.” While the labyrinth offers a confusing array of dark passageways, the thread of love is a slender, unified path to follow out of the darkness and into the light. As a mortal person—especially those of us who aren't monks or nuns—daily life and religious life have to exist simultaneously, one on top of the other. The speaker has to figure out both kinds of love, but her desire is for the divine love that would free her forever from the labyrinth.
The Difficulty of Romantic Love
Another important idea in Sonnet 77 is the difficulty of romantic love. Although Wroth never explicitly states that the labyrinth represents a relationship, we can infer this based on the results of her decisions: love, suspicion, shame. Wroth suggests that part of what makes romantic relationships difficult is the endless choices they offer. The speaker can turn in so many directions, and all of them lead to different, undesirable outcomes. Furthermore, the speaker can’t rely on rationality to make her decisions. As a symbol, the labyrinth suggests that navigating love is like moving through a dark, confusing maze with limited information. Although the speaker seems to know what hazards she will meet with each different decision, she doesn’t have a clear end goal, so she can’t have a strategy for determining her next move. Instead, she must surrender herself to the maze, suppressing her doubts and summoning her courage to move through the dark without a clear goal, as she does in stanza 3.
