"It is not love which you poor fools do deem" is a sonnet that appears in Lady Mary Wroth's 1621 sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. In it, the speaker (Pamphilia) challenges an unknown group of antagonists by asserting that her representation of love is more genuine then theirs. While the specific audience is never mentioned, Pamphilia criticizes a number of poetic tropes that are most often associated with the (male) Petrarchists of the Elizabethan period.
Through its comparison of the various ways to represent love as a poet, Sonnet 40 asks readers to consider the difference between poetic convention and innovation. Keenly aware of her place as one of few female "love poets," Wroth lends a critical eye to the idea of expressing love through Petrarchan rhetoric. As such, she cultivates a markedly "feminine" approach to love, one which relies not on the language of performance but instead on truth, silence, and quiet suffering.
