'Pamphilia to Amphilanthus' Summary

The sonnet sequence is organized in four sections. In the first, fifty-five-poem section, Pamphilia determines her true feelings about her unfaithful lover, toward whom she is ambivalent throughout this section, though she affirms her choice to love Amphilanthus by its end. After a series of songs, the next section, of ten poems, takes on a darker tone as Pamphilia confronts doubt and jealously, but the end of the sequence finds her seeking forgiveness from Cupid, the god of love, to whom she promises a crown of sonnets as penance for her doubt. The crown's fourteen sonnets form the sequence's third section. The final eight sonnets in the sequence comprise the fourth section, in which Pamphilia returns to a darker, melancholy tone, but understands that her suffering is necessary in order to understand the inner world of human emotion.