A corona (
Latin for crown) is a form of
sonnet sequence wherein the last line of one
sonnet becomes the first line of the next, and the first line of the sequence is repeated in the last line. In more modern poetry, the
repetition can be somewhat less
strict, but the lines must strongly
echo one another. The corona can include any number of sonnets, as long as the very last line links to the very first. A seven-sonnet corona ("
La Corona") opens
John Donne's "
Holy Sonnets," and Lady Mary Wroth includes one twice as long ("
A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love") in her
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.
As with other linked poetry (the villanelle, the pantoum), the repetition in a corona can be used to set the poem's tone. Wroth's corona, though "dedicated to love," centers around the theme of a labyrinth, and the interlacing of the sonnets makes the poem itself evoke the twisting and turning of a maze. Mary Moore, in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, writes:
Lady Mary Wroth's 1621 sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, alludes to these contexts with the opening of the corona that crowns the sequence: "In this strange labourinth how shall I turne?" The temporal and spatial vagaries of "this" and the punning "labour" of Wroth's spelling evoke the poem itself as intricate space and Pamphilia's thought as labyrinthine source of mimetic writing. Like the mazes of classical literature, architecture, and art familiar to Renaissance readers of Pliny, Ovid, and Virgil, Wroth's artifact represents perplexity even as it perplexes.