Petrarch (2 page)

T
ABLE
1.
Cyclic Distribution of Poems

Early in its development the work was divided by Petrarch into two parts, which stand
in the final collection as poems 1–263 and 264–366. This division was sometimes used
by later editors to separate the poems into the “life” and “death” of Laura, since
her departure from this world is announced in poem 267. Several blank pages, whose
significance has been differently interpreted, follow the last sonnet of Part I. These
pages may indicate that Petrarch intended to add more poems to the work, or that he
might have wanted the first part to tally with the second in terms of total
number of spiritual debits and credits, with this space supplied for a final accounting.
In keeping with earlier medieval practice, such a two-part form provided a framework
for spiritual rebirth, experience in the first providing cause for reflection and
repentance in the second and reason for self-integration at the end.

The
Canzoniere
became one of the most influential books of poetry in Western literature, its metaphors
and conceits absorbed into the language of love to such a degree that it would be
difficult to calculate the limits of Petrarch’s influence. The sonnet, canzone, and
sestina forms are redefined by it, and the mind that ruled their invention continues
to shadow itself forth in Italian poetry today. The vernacular idiom he used echoes
in our own language, both literary and musical; and his personification of the hapless
lover as antihero has become one of our major models. Petrarch was a great lyric poet,
but also a gifted psychologist whose researches into the literature of the ages and
into his own psyche drew him deep into regions where true guilt and innocence are
found. Humble sinner, aesthete, secretly tormented spirit, droll observer and advocate
of life, the “I” in these poems possesses a personality as complex as his experience
of his times. In a continual state of becoming, deterioration, or delicate balance
(depending on the poem’s point of view), he is certain only of once having seen and
fallen in love with a woman whose qualities and effects dominate his thoughts from
that day forth.

For readers of the fourteenth century, Petrarch was best known as the Christian Cicero,
a moral philosopher and author of such lengthy prose treatises in Latin as the popular
De remediis utriusque fortunae
(titled
Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul
in a recent translation by Conrad M. Rawski), as well as for his Latin poetry, very
little of which has survived. But in later years it was Petrarch’s
Canzoniere
that took root and flowered in the literature. Picked over for its metaphoric and
metrical riches, this enigmatic verse was transplanted into the many derivative styles
known as Petrarchism—a fate which the
Canzoniere
itself prophesies by telling how his vision of Laura, in the beginning electrifying
yet simple and refreshing in a chilling sort of way, is misinterpreted by a world
hungry for love and is finally stripped of its relevance by Fortune toward the end.
The pure dramaticity of the poems struck sensitive minds with such newness and aptness
that Petrarch’s story became reality for poets and readers alike, its emotional peaks
and depths everyday tests of a lover’s sincerity. The fact that the work examines,
among other things, the peculiar interactions among poet, reader, and text, exposing
the strongest and weakest points in each step of the creative and reading process,
was obscured from view behind veils of mythicizing quite of Petrarch’s own making.

Petrarch was one of the great ironists, capable of standing back from himself with
a sense of wonder and objectivity, amusement and pain; he was one who could regard
life’s course with a reserved sense of its wholeness and inevitability while at the
same time recording its moments as if each were happening for the first time. Out
of this sense of himself as an actor in a drama being enacted in his times, he created
step by step a fictional autobiography whose truths may be fully appreciated only
at the completion of the work, as an experience shared by reader and poet. Yet the
pleasure of reading the
Canzoniere
may also come suddenly, from its many small revelations. One in particular is the
discovery that its satire is not limited to blatantly outright attacks on the political,
religious, and cultural establishments of his day. Numerous other poems in the collection
deliver their blows in covert ways, inviting us to rage, weep, or laugh over some
perfidy or folly. And many of the poems which cause a modern reader to wince because
of their extravagant style (their incessant weeping, egocentricity, and
obsession with love and death) were intentionally designed to entertain and edify
Petrarch’s contemporary audience. Anticipating these elements in the lyrics helps
explain some of the anomalous aspects of the work and establish their place in the
whole as expressions of a generally tragicomic view of things, designed to give discomfort
as well as pleasure, with moral uplift as a hard-won bonus.

That the
Canzoniere
is a kind of fiction Petrarch tells us himself in the first poem, as if one day he
fell asleep and dreamed a dream of pleasure from which he awakened some time later
a sad but wiser man. Because such an admission of error could be dismissed as a bit
of prevarication or literary convention or as an expression of the sexual impotence
of an old man, readers may easily accept the poems that follow and their protagonist
at face value, as laments of a poet-singer torn between good and bad impulses and
struggling to deal with the pathos of unrequited, illicit love. But Petrarch was combining
many threads of a complex poetic tradition in his
Canzoniere,
from a body of literature that he had read and absorbed from an early age and continued
to interpolate into his work throughout his life. The writings of Varro, Catullus,
Horace, Virgil at his most parodic, Ovid at his peak and in exile; of Cicero, Propertius,
Juvenal, Seneca, Ausonius, Boethius, the St. Augustine of the
Confessiones,
and numerous others find expression in the
Canzoniere,
along with the lyrics of goliardic, the Sicilian, and Provençal poets, of Cavalcanti,
Dante and the
dolce stil nuovo
(“sweet new style”), which Petrarch inherited by virtue of being born in 1304. The
individuality of Catullus, the eminent rationalism and amused stoicism of Cicero,
the cosmopolitanism and dramaticity of Seneca, the metaphoric fecundity of Ovid, the
sharp-tongued literalness of Juvenal, and the literary playfulness of the Horace of
Ars poetica,
all inform the styles Petrarch reveals to us in these poems. Whatever their rich
variety may communicate, they do not derive from a narrow view of love poetry

It is Dante, however, with whom Petrarch seems to carry on a running dialogue in the
Canzoniere,
rendering him the ultimate praise of imitating him from beginning to end. As Virgil
came to Dante with the force of a completed text in
Inferno
I, offering himself as a guide out of the Pilgrim’s moral dilemma, Dante’s work may
have provided the same kind of impetus for Petrarch. He may figure as the one to whom
the early Apollonian poems of the
Canzoniere
are addressed, the precursor whose Beatrice is reconstituted in a nearly Christ-like
Laura in poem 4 and many poems to follow. Both poets produced works that grew from
certain ironies implicit in the form and style chosen; they aim, by incongruity and
irresolution, at a core human truth. Although we are asked to believe, in both the
Vita nuova
and the
Canzoniere,
that each poet set out speaking in the voice of a reformed, pious, and celibate man
who has conquered his weaknesses, the assumption is meant to be tested at every step
of the way (even well into the
Divina commedia,
in the case of Dante). In such a dramatic structure, weakness of character is forged
into strength not through windy good intentions and hyperbolic speech but through
being brought up short by brute experience, Fortune, one’s fellow creatures, and oneself.
Each of them, Dante’s Pilgrim and Petrarch’s Lover, is a man in the making; the creators
of their fictional autobiography, on the other hand, stand distinctly and mysteriously
outside it, having detached themselves judiciously from their own life.

Dante is summoned out of the near past in the
Canzoniere
in its very first poem, which echoes a sonnet from
Vita nuova
VII, “O ye who travel on the road of Love.” Both poets imagine themselves as supplicants
at the side of the road of life, begging to be heard both through the sound and the
sense of their songs. Each undertakes to describe
a genesis, the origin of the poetic idea, which took the form of a lasting impression
delivered through sense experience. At the point of perception (a triple knowing,
as both describe it), the divisions begin that lead in their unfolding to the complexity
of the poets’ metaphoric and cognitive structures.

Petrarch’s imaginative landscapes, as well as his protagonists’ virtues and flaws,
continually recall those of the
Commedia
while giving them a wholly individual aesthetic twist. There are veiled allusions
in the
Canzoniere
to Dante’s fearless descents to new levels of earthiness and squalor in the
Inferno,
echoes of his polemical fervor, self-mockery, and self-abasement in the
Purgatorio,
his self-aggrandizement and eventual harmonizing of opposing factors in the
Paradiso.
Petrarch’s employment of verbal sleights of hand and his invitation to deep reading
recall Dante’s devices in his first two canticles, as well as his clarity and questioning
of the capacity of language to bridge the gap between the physical and metaphysical
in the second part of the
Paradiso.

Dante, like Petrarch, invites us to see with the eyes of his protagonist and to imagine
ourselves as he is in his becoming; but he does so with a sense of proportion always
in play. He gives his Pilgram rein to wander in error but within the stringent limits
of a moral system defined ever more clearly as the action unfolds. Petrarch struggles
against Dante’s limits, seems to go overboard, and learns to adjust to them in the
Canzoniere.
And although Dante may range over the panoply of known history in his
Commedia,
he repeatedly returns, up to the thirtieth canto of the
Paradiso,
to the first item on his agenda, the need to reform his own tortured age, as Petrarch
does in his lyrics. Both are rooted in the present, in the religious and political
wars of city-states, papacy, and empire, singlemindedly proselytizing for their moral
beliefs with their dramas.

Along with Varro, Boethius in the
Consolatione Philosophiae,
and Dante in the
Vita nuova,
Petrarch is often linked with the tradition of Menippean satires for the variety
of forms he used in the
Canzoniere,
but his satiric impulse has not been examined to any notable degree in commentary
on the individual poems themselves. Yet when a political gibe is perceived in poems
199-200, for example, two sonnets about Lauras hand and glove, a wholly new purpose
for these poems may emerge. Like a modern political cartoon, poem 199 draws a picture
of a tiny poet observing the power figure from a vantage point somewhere near the
tip of his toe (the tough politico dressed in a bridal gown):

O lovely hand that squeezes my heart tight,

enclosing in so little space my life,

hand upon which all art and care was spent

by Nature and by Heaven for its praise,

with your five pearls of oriental hue

whose only bitter cruelness is to wound me,

those fingers long and soft which naked now

luckily Love shows me for my enrichment.

Pure white and gaily light, dear glove

that covers polished ivory and fresh roses,