Petrarch (3 page)

who ever saw on earth such gracious spoils?

Would that I had as much of her fair veil!

O the inconstancy of human things!

But this is theft, and must be taken back.

The hand without the glove reveals the bright red fingernails and ivory skin of the
temptress, whose arms will suffocate protest and whose head and face, in poem 200,
will block out divine light. The hand and glove symbols Petrarch coyly manipulates
here—because they are known signifiers of monarchy and papacy—he repossesses through
means of a new sycophantic style in poem 201, maintaining the purity of his original
vision of Laura in the last lines but indicating that he has discovered the uses of
flattery—learned to be sly, entered his maturity. This series of “polished” rhymes
peaks with poem 205, in which the word
dolce
(sweet) is repeated thirteen times. Poem 208, on the other hand, is a no-holds-barred
attack on the papacy that defines his terms unmistakably. Its tone of pious servility
barely masks a scorn more carefully concealed in other poems but nonetheless enduring,
reappearing at the end of the
Canzoniere
in sonnets that address the most exalted subject matter.

Petrarch probably meant for the reader to be reverent and amused at the same time
in reading these poems, to hear the echo of doubt or mockery or humor in them, and
to recognize the serious implications. It is doubtful that he ever intended merely
to amuse with his occasional vulgarity and parody of style but more likely that when
his lover is precious, fatuous, falsely pious, naively bouyant, or blinded by tears,
the poet is asking the reader to look beyond the obvious and comic to causes and effects,
to see how the poem fits into an argument and leads to the next. Few poems in the
Canzoniere
are free of the taint of his questioning. In the well-known “whore of Babylon” series,
for example (poems 136-141), Petrarch’s hatred of the corrupt papal court in Avignon
expresses itself in language inferred earlier in numerous lyrics to his lady.

Petrarch was known to speak of his historical time as a continuation of the dark ages
whose most striking symptom of decay was the removal of the papal court from Rome
to Avignon in 1309. On this fertile ground for romance, intrigue, and religious and
political protest, he constructed the materials of the
Canzoniere.
When the family was forced into exile from Florence in the same purge of Whites that
banished Dante in 1302, and when it had left Italy for Avignon in 1311 (Francesco
was seven), he experienced a beginning in discontinuity which provided the background
for one of the central paradoxes of the work. He found himself at an early date entangled
in the affairs of an establishment he scorned, in a locale that he came to love with
all the passion of which he was capable, having left behind a city, Florence, which
had disenfranchised him. Avignon became the poet’s labyrinth and his purgatory, a
“Babylon” to which he voluntarily returned for many years to serve as cleric and diplomat
for cardinals and popes. Although he made frequent descents into the “open valley”
of his native land and traveled into many regions of Europe, it was not until 1353
that he left Avignon for the last time. Vaucluse, on the other hand, was the beloved
place of retirement from worldly affairs that completed the triangle with Italy and
Avignon—Petrarch’s link with the beauty of nature, with solitude, and with literary
pursuits. In this small village a short distance from Avignon, where the wilderness
came right up to the edge of his garden but where he felt completely safe and in possession
of himself, he was able to sit at his desk and imagine another kind of wilderness
across the plain, in the palaces of the papal city.

Petrarch first saw Laura in the Church of St. Clare in Avignon on 6 April 1327 (the
location written by the author on the flyleaf of his copy of Virgil, which survives,
and the date in poem 211 of the
Canzoniere),
a primal experience he first locates in space in poem 3 and to which he returns as
if to a stillpoint throughout the collection.
Like all the facts about himself that Petrarch chose to reveal in prominent or out-of-the-way
writings, this one had its peculiar significance for him; but it has been obscured
by another tradition somewhat supported by the text that reveals their meeting to
have been on the wooded bank of the Sorgue, near Vaucluse, where Laura walked or bathed
one day with her friends. Such mixing of sacred and profane allegory was common at
the time and indicated the multiform purpose the maiden served (Huizinga has noted,
p. III, that Petrarch’s contemporary, Machaut, located his dalliance with Peronnelle
in nature and in church, doing novenas for her on one occasion). That the site Petrarch
identified was St. Clare’s may be significant, since as a disciple of St. Francis
and the nun who founded the order of “poor Clares,” she was most loved for the very
qualities he celebrates in the
Canzoniere,
for her humility, prudence, natural wisdom, generosity, and beauty of soul, as well
as for her charity to the poor. Her example may have provided a needed antithesis
to the Curia that ruled church practice where he worshipped, representing an ideal
he could not bear to see sunk in “mud” (poem 259) without protesting. Protest he did
by making one of the aspects of Laura a personification of St. Clare’s Church in captivity.

On another symbolic level, Laura as Daphne (Ovid’s maiden in
Metamorphoses,
turned into the laurel tree when she spurned the love of Apollo) is the poetic idea
itself, which the poet pursues through the forests of feeling and thought until he
almost seizes her, when she becomes the poem on the page, freed of his desire and
her mortal life, transformed into someone else’s plant to cultivate. This transformation
is given its primary didactic meaning for Petrarch in poem 23, the canzone of the
metamorphoses, when he himself becomes the laurel. Until she is transformed into the
tree, Daphne/ Laura is as light, free, and compelling as the desire which gives rise
to the idea, or the virginal eye and ear which receive the poem in its finished form.
She may at various times be herself, the poem, the poet, or the reader.

That a real Laura existed, however, became legend early in Petrarch’s career. People
searched for a candidate for her as they had for Dante’s Beatrice (one settled on
in the eighteenth century was Laura de Sade of Avignon). But details about her in
the
Canzoniere
are never more than sketchy and ephemeral. “Femina è cosa mobile per natura” (a woman
is by nature changeable) he admits in poem 183, as if responding to a criticism that
her character seems to be too variable, changing as often as his style in these “scattered
rhymes.” Petrarch was well aware of the duplicitous nature of the poetry of any era
written in praise of the
bella donna,
and he capitalized on it in his own way. If she was to be a projection of his better
self, how to make her seductive to the reader? If she was to be the object of his
lust or satirical scorn, how to conceal the edge of his blade in silken trappings?
But Petrarch also insisted that Laura was more than an envisioning, more than an evocative
name: “The living Laura by whose person I seem to be captured” was no deception, he
wrote in a letter to his friend Giacomo Co-lonna, who had questioned her existence.
“I wish indeed that you were joking about this particular matter, and that she indeed
had been a fiction and not a madness” (Bishop, p. 31). Neither here nor anywhere else
does he confirm Laura’s actual identity as a woman, nor his love for her as more than
a transient passion; but that she was a palpable force is undeniable. The marvelous
fecundity of the
Canzoniere
lies in his desire to keep her beauty and virtue alive while acknowledging her power
to lead him astray. Although Petrarch knew that in Augustinian terms he must renounce
her (in his confessional
Secretum,
the dialogue with St. Augustine that he never published, love
of Laura is acknowledged to be a stumbling block to his salvation), not only her usefulness
to him as a medium for teaching but also those very intrinsic qualities that make
the fact or fiction of her being significant continued to hold him hostage to her
all the years of his life. In recantatory writings, he claimed to have given her up
(e.g., “The Letter to Posterity”), but in the course of the
Canzoniere
Laura lives long after her death, and he relinquishes his hold on her only at the
last moment in poem 366 when he gives up his spirit to God.

Whether or not Laura was a real woman centers on the fact that in the
Canzoniere,
unlike the
Commedia,
certain of the beloved’s physical attributes are evoked more often than any others,
her beauty in its essence having a talismanic value to which the poet repeatedly returns
for inspiration and solace. Dante spoke of Beatrice’s dress, presence, effects, voice,
and speech in both the
Vita nuova
and the
Commedia,
yet he did not dwell on her bodily charms. Although Petrarch does not touch on more
than Laura’s eyes, face, and hair, with occasional delicate references to her arms,
hands, bosom, and feet, he does depart from Dante by making her natural beauty, rather
than her divine wisdom and eloquence, her most alluring feature. And he goes further
in many poems in which the most precise identification is the pronoun “she,” by making
her a composite of the gnostic Sophia, Beatrice, Daphne, the biblical Rachel, Matelda
(Beatrice’s handmaiden in Purgatory), Francesca da Rimini, Proserpina, the Italian
goddess Cardea (whose power is to open what is shut and to shut what is open), Rhea
Silvia (mother of Rome), Minerva, Diana and Venus—successors and precursors to Mary
Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. But taken all together Laura’s physical attributes
make a strange pastiche: her black and white eyes, blond hair that undergoes several
style changes, black-black eyebrows, bloodred lips, and pearly skin and fingernails
often give the appearance of the courtesan. At other times, when Petrarch does not
infer corruption but elicits instead an ideal natural beauty, Laura comes alive as
the young joyous maiden making her majestic way through nature, all gold and white
and rosy innocence. In his greatest and most seductive verse, color is supreme.

An examination of Laura in some of the well-known poems may give an idea of her versatile
yet enduring power to induce a change in the love poet, to elicit the poem that speaks
the mind of the poet to the reader he has in mind at the moment (Petrarch’s goal as
a writer, given in the opening letter to his collection
Rerum familiarum libri).
The three “sister” canzoni, poems 71-73, known as the “canzoni of the eyes,” were
undertaken to reproduce poetically the experience of the Neoplatonic intellective
act in the context of a physical love. Rooted philosophically in the language of St.
Augustine, they contain some important indicators for the overall design of the
Canzoniere.
In their unity they form an architecture that seems to inform the whole collection,
peaking with poem 72 and its daydream of fulfillment and connecting, perhaps, with
the three canzoni of the
Vita nuova,
which hold the structure of that little book in place. Yet these canzoni by Petrarch
are built on shaky ground: he will insist more than a few times in their verses that
there are faultlines to be discovered during his ascent of the philosophical mountain,
in himself and in the unworthiness of his enterprise, that in effect, by his very
nature and in the face of his lady’s indifference, he cannot achieve more than brief
joy in contemplation of her. In poem 125, therefore, the first of five crucial canzoni,
Laura is evoked as the ear deaf to his appeals, the disdainful Daphne for whom he
seeks to adjust his style. As the canzone progresses, however, a change takes place,
whether within himself or within her is not revealed, yet its effects are sufficient
to bring the poem to a singing conclusion. A tension is created in lines 14-26 by
his dividing himself and his poetry into two, into surface (style) and inner core
(meaning). Laura by analogy has her inner and outer aspects. Beginning with language
that is ingeniously rough (unsophisticated or unpolished, he calls it) but etymologically
rich, and which suggests that Laura herself is mysteriously deep although at present
denuded of sweetness, he goes on to protest his inability to achieve the mellifluous
style required to reach her heart. Only when he touches the “green shore” at line
49 does the language begin to pulsate with the energy he claims is hidden in his core
in the opening lines, signaling a complete change in mood that carries him to the
end of the poem (see 125.46-52). Within the space of eighty-one lines he has reversed
himself, making inner outer, soothing his harsh words from an inner source of sweetness.
Whether the “blessèd spirit” Laura might also share the fire and flow of lines 53
onward may be asked legitimately, and is in the final stanza; but to know more about
her mystery, he concludes, would be a loss.

Poem 125 begins with a rocky ascent through the language of paradox to reach a kind
of
locus amoenus
(earthly paradise) in line 49. In poem 126 (perhaps Petrarch’s most famous canzone),
he pauses in this place. The poem elicits felt time—a reverence for antiquity, nostalgia
for the future, a passionate involvement in the continuous past that the poet writing
in the present draws forth in the form of vision. The effect is that of free floating,
of an eternality blessed with the beauty of the woman in her natural setting, coming,
re-coming and reigning whether he lives or dies. Although his past is unrecoverable—that
brief golden age he describes in the first stanza—it lives as narrative in the music
of imperfect, hence still unfinished verbs and in gerunds whose caressing motion is
an invitation to oblivion. The beauty of the lady in lines 40-52 forces an instant
and powerful response; it is impossible to resist her, not to behold her compelling
reality. Although the poet speaks of an antiquity suggestive of ruin in stanza I and
a future so remote and sugar-coated that it skirts maudlinism in stanza 3, in stanza
4 he transcends it all by performing an act of love most chastely before our eyes.
And although it is clear that the act is autoerotic (all the canzone takes the form
of wishful thinking), the woman’s power to focus love and pity on herself to the exclusion
of all else overwhelms any sly motive the author may have had to disparage himself.
Petrarch’s discursive style in this poem is quite different from Dante’s in the providentially
beautiful “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare” of
Vita nuova XXVI
, but its core message is the same. The truth lies in divine love residing in the
lady; form lies in the lady, and the literal meaning that is the husk of a man’s life
provides the context for her coming.