Petrarch (6 page)

And if they do contain a few expressions or little words here and there that are somewhat
freer than a prude might find proper (ladies of the type who weigh words more than
deeds and who strive more to seem good than to be so), let me say that it is no more
improper for me to have written these words than for men and women at large to fill
their everyday speech with such words as ‘hole,’ ‘peg,’ ‘mortar,’ ‘pestle,’ ‘wiener,’
and ‘fat sausage,’ and other similar expressions.

Boccaccio excuses himself on the grounds that “even more outrageous stories are to
be found in the Church’s annals than in my own writings,” referring first to the inevitable
pitfalls in vernacular language, rooted as it often is in the carnal, and perhaps
second to Latin monastic texts of the late Middle Ages interwoven with sexual material
that caressed God’s blessings too sensuously, particularly in writings about the Holy
Family. However, double entendre and widespread signaling of concupiscence were only
some of the dangers to be encountered in literature. The imprecision of grammar and
ambiguous syntax were also pitfalls. Petrarch uses and abuses these and other faults
of speech in a number of ways in the first part of the
Canzoniere,
inflating his metaphors, for example, in poems 176-178 and 189; demonstrating vacuousness
and redundancy in poems 74,170,184, 205, 217, and 219; and exploiting the sexual connotations
of words all through the collection. The long sonnet cycles of the middle part of
the work (following poem 150 and ending with 263) often play with language to the
point of parody, using its structures to show how it may strain under too great a
weight or describe the confused mental state of the protagonist or reveal the innate
propensity of words to transform themselves when met within a new context.

Such threats to signification, as Gellrich has shown, had long been medieval preoccupations,
to be remedied by the search for a pure, original tongue through which the holy subject
might interact with earthly texts while yet remaining virginal. For Hugh of St. Victor,
for example, seeking the way back to the primal tongue entailed coming “through the
word to a concept, through a concept to a thing, through the thing to its idea, and
through its idea [arriving] at truth” (Gellrich, p. 101). It could be said that Petrarch
began the
Canzoniere
with one such noble goal in mind: the desperate love of the poet would be put to
the task of finding the one and only meaning of
the word. But a penchant for exploring etymology and the underpinnings of speech opened
up intriguing complexities early in the work, beginning with the evocation of the
name LAURETA in poem 5:

When I summon my sighs to call for you,

with that name Love inscribed upon my heart,

in LAUdable the sound at the beginning

of the sweet accents of that word come forth.

Your REgal state which I encounter next

doubles my strength for the high enterprise,

but “TAcitly,” the end cries, “for her honor

needs better shoulders for support than yours.”

And so, to LAUd and to REvere the word

itself instructs whenever someone calls you,

O lady worthy of all praise and honor,

unless, perhaps, Apollo be offended

that morTAl tongue be so presumptuous

to speak of his eternally green boughs.

By dividing the name into the three syllables LAU, RE, and TA, the poem points to
the worthy but chancy goal of completing the sentence (
copulatio
of subject and object) without having compromised its high subject matter. Poem 5
outlines a doubly difficult task. In order to bridge the contrarities of language
with a “smoothly apportioned construction,” as Hugh of St. Victor had called the superstructure
of Scripture, Petrarch had first to reconcile fundamental opposites with occult skills.
Following St. Augustine, Hugh had written in his
Didascalicon
of Scripture’s
aedificium:

The foundation is in the earth, and it does not always have smoothly fitted stones.
The superstructure rises above the earth, and it demands a smoothly apportioned construction.
Even so the Divine Page, in its literal sense, contains many things which seem both
to be opposed to each other and, sometimes, to impart something that smacks of the
absurd or the impossible. But the spiritual meaning admits no opposition; in it, many
things can be different from one another, but none can be opposed. (Quoted in Gellrich,
p. 133)

Presuming that Petrarch set out to highlight the spiritual meaning of sacred language
and became sidetracked by its contrarities and “things that smack of the absurd”—the
peculiar departures from logic buried in the vocabulary he was using, for example—it
is possible to read a subtext into the
Canzoniere
that explains many of its disjunctions as picaresque or intuitive researches into
verbal ground a fourteenth-century poet could only guess at from the vernacular language
he had to work with. In the course of the work, “stones” which the poet selects to
form his superstructure seem to become progressively more riddled with doubt about
the wider implications of terms for Laura’s cultured social virtues (e.g., chastity,
honor, humility, honesty, valor, beauty, and grace), more covered over with verbal
briars of a rough, barbaric sort (his prickles, burrs, and arid outgrowths, images
that continually recall the wasteland), with the result that they prove at first testing
in
Part I
of the work not to support belief. The reader is struck
again and again with what appears to be skepticism on the part of the poet, what De-Sanctis
referred to as a shrinking back from the sublime. The search for a convincing representation
of virtue is made into allegory for the failure of reason to find definition, to maintain
a brave and steady light in the midst of ghostly appearances. The last sonnet in Part
I, poem 263, therefore ends quixotically. The poem is top-heavy, its triumph seeming
hollow as a sequel to what has come before. This may be why in the next canzone, “
I’ vo pensando” (I go on thinking), he is as sunk in his moral dilemma as ever.

Because of the inherent ambivalence of the language Petrarch chooses to use at many
points in the
Canzoniere,
no doubt partly in response to everyday usage he could not resist recording, his
critical sense takes over from the romantic early in the work. The final lines of
poem 16, a sonnet cherished over the centuries for its pathos and composed for the
most part of humble physical details, seem deliberately to trivialize Platonic ideality
(even risking blasphemy, as some have noted), as if to bring attention to the folklore
built up around it. The pilgrim, the image of Christ, the woman, and the desiring
poet make of their elements a strange mix—one rough communal cloth. What Petrarch
seems to be saying in poem 16 is, look at the literal earthiness from which this concept
of
vera forma
springs. Inquiry leads him, as it did Socrates and Dante, into the fundaments of
speech. From poem 5 onward, an honorable end is frequently called upon to justify
the means the poet employs to redeem the whole; 5.7-8, 23.31,140.14, and 207.65 are
statements of this principle. But sometimes in pursuit of a virtuous human love, honor
proves to be difficult to recall in the face of a complex reality. Eventually the
poet languishes, his chosen medium of love poetry having reached a blind alley, as
in poem 224. Because he is deprived by unrequited love of the power to bring his unique
vision into focus, to decisively communicate, he falls into the fragmentary, the base,
the infinitely reductive. Coherence is sacrificed late in
Part I
and not restored until he purges himself of his youthful pretensions of grandeur
in poems 323 and 332.

The
Canzoniere’s
progressions suggest that Petrarch diverged from the grand tradition of literature,
from heroics and architectonics, partly in order to create an ingenious thematic sourcebook
of poetic language, one that developed into completeness—from grandiose assumptions
to questioning to cynicism to acceptance of limitations—almost in spite of itself.
Later, when he began arranging poems into finished collections, he came to regard
his sonnets as
nugellae,
figuratively “trifles” but etymologically the buried seeds he hoped would germinate
in other poets, even if the epic style of Homer, Virgil, and Dante proved to be beyond
him. His poems offer little clues that lead out of the labyrinth of reasoning, each
connected to the other in a contextual sense through its innate particularities, each
offering its potential for flowering into beauty or for illuminating the dangers encountered
in the writing process. In his honest appraisals of poetry’s power and shortcomings,
Petrarch shows how an enduring model of expression might emerge.

Mazzotta (p. 77) writes that for Petrarch, “language
betrays
desire, both in the sense that it reveals desire, is its spy, and because language
bears an essential otherness to the desire that generates it.” However, such treachery
can be intentional or unintentional; in Petrarch’s verse in particular, inadvertent
betrayals often result from diverse readings of terms. What is this
mal
of his anyway? (The term appears over sixty times in the
Canzoniere
.) Perhaps the principal red herring in love poetry, it can be translated as
“harm,” “pain,” “weakness,” “illness,” or “evil.” Reducing its sense in every case
to concupiscence (the ecclesiastical meaning to which many commentators refer) confuses
the issue, never more so than in reading the
Canzoniere,
where sex often seems to be the last thing on his mind. Pinpointing the true and
only meaning of
mal
equates with finding the ultimate meaning of Laura, a sense that shades into or emerges
from the character of the individual poem, from where it stands in the text, and from
what it says about where it stands. One ultimately weighs the burden of evidence to
reach definition.

Petrarch’s modus operandi always was to send the mind back to the genesis of language
in nature and in God—practically speaking back to the poems preceding, with their
categories carefully established and metaphorical structures precise and uncompromising.
The first ten sonnets, for example, may have been intended to be paradigmatic, to
correspond with medieval number symbolism. Poem I, an epilogue or exergue, speaks
summarily from outside the work; poem 2 begins his history as set into motion by poem
I; poem 3 links the soul in time with the demiurge Love; poem 4 establishes a foundation
in time and place; poem 5 envisions the beloved in a worldly setting; poem 6 succumbs
to her in rapture; poem 7 states his mortal goal as a poet; poem 8 shows the spiritual
plight of one devout man caught in the world’s “last days”; poem 9 prophesies the
root cause for his falling short in artistic terms; and poem 10, with its note of
preparation for a second coming, enlists all the poem’s elements in the service of
the friends of Christ. When he wanders off the well-traveled path, as he does in his
long sonnet series (see table 1, p. xii), it is to escape an impasse. What seems conflicted
in his thought processes at first, too absolutist or self-defeating in early poems
such as 22, 30, 66, and 80 (sestinas which seek to fix, in their six recurring rhymes,
six shades of meaning), begins to loosen and become more supple in these stylistic
excursions. What distinguishes a sonnet series such as poems 215-236, for example,
is the way Petrarch makes a penance of experimentation in a group of twenty-two poems
as rich with earthy vocabulary as any in the work. Again, in poems 150-205 and 333-358,
it is possible to recognize the free-thinker at work, pushing the limits of doctrine.
Each sonnet in these series has its own purpose, yet in their variety they reveal
the ways in which language can be precise or made vague and subjective, both enriched
and debased by terms meant to serve temporal aims.

In a philosophic framework Petrarch shows how poetic language sells itself short by
mesmerizing itself with beauty and exhausting itself with hyperbole. That he succeeds
in doing this without losing the poem’s value as a mode of communication is a measure
of his power as an artist. In poem 248—and in poem 261, a companion to that sonnet—after
he has despaired of a response from the world that might reconfirm the viability of
his vision (Laura is rumored to have died), he turns back to the Dantesque model as
if putting
la bella donna
up for a mock sale, advertising her beauty and virtue one last time before death
overtakes her. It is not that the poetry in these sonnets fails to please, but that
it hints at a bitter truth with its vain repetitions; in a rhetorical burst of energy
the poems emphasize the futility of relying on such model human perfection in the
face of pitiless forces. If the reader is moved to wonder how these sonnets late in
Part I
are related, it is because history (in this case, political failure as well as the
Black Death) intrudes on the poet’s dream of persuading us with his eloquence; it
fractures all reason and gentility.

In order to perceive how this happens, one may regard the
Canzoniere
as a corpus (a term Petrarch used to describe his collected letters) and the middle
part from poems
150—270 as its inner vitals, and therefore to anticipate that its core poetry will
be expressed in language “related to the subject matter of our discourse,” as Lady
Philosophy explained in Boethius’s work,
De Consolatione Philosophiae.
Without a doubt, the first part of the work contains the most brilliant poems, products
of an intellect in high gear informed by the data of his cultivated senses. When he
sets off on his travels into lower forms of poetic expression, however, the cerebral
will be assisted by gut reactions, so that the poet’s tendency to gorge on everything
at the table in the 56-sonnet cycle (poems 150-205) will be followed by the urgent
need to purge himself of impurity in poems 215-236. There, in the interest of truth,
he states the most fundamental facts of his wretchedness. With the mention of wormwood
in poem 215, for example, he begins a series in which images of evil, death, defecation,
and delirium create in him and his verse a paroxysm of suffering. Poem 217 finds him
in a pit of self-disgust, its terms
querela, fervide, fessi
(an unusual form of
facessi,
that is, “would make,” which appears in lines 3 and 7),
I’empia nube, rompesse a l’aura,
and
cruda
sardonically juxtaposed with the last tercet’s
divina … beltate.
Like poem 135, the confessional canzone that precedes his scurrilous attack on the
papal court in poems 136-141, these sonnets serve a purpose—to shock and fix the attention
of his audience on his audacity, particularly in poems 227-229 with their frankly
Dionysian elements, from earliest times accompaniments of war and disease. They prepare
the way for the art of poems 237-239, poems perhaps closest to his heart. Poem 236
wryly sums up the rationale for his daring. Nothing in the work will match the 22-sonnet
cycle for explicitness, although poems 333-358 resemble it in their proximity to death,
and the last sestina, poem 332, will perfect its analogies by emptying him even of
the will to shock.