Petrarch (7 page)

Language in the
Canzoniere
naturally departs from itself, beginning with the lover’s falling away from innocence
in poem 2 and leading eventually deep into the matrix of self. Petrarch’s peculiar
genius reveals itself in the way he is able to make his waywardness relevant, to seize
on the word or metaphor that will test Hugh of St. Victor’s principle that although
physical or moral particulars may be absurd or different from one another (
fuoco/fire
and
ghiaccio/ice,
or
onestate/chastity
and
leggiadrial
charm), on some level of understanding they are held in tension. Both intestinal
and moral pain, as well as the sensation of love, oscillate between freezing and burning,
holding the person to the test of the body. An appearance of virtue may cover a multitude
of common, ordinary sins, and charm may be a veneer over the most cruel and base nature—may
even coexist with it in apparent harmony. (Petrarch found in Cicero’s letters to Atticus,
discovered by him in 1345, unnerving discrepancies between the public and the private
man that forced him to reassess his early high opinion of Cicero.) Cicero had demonstrated
the manner in which
honestum
and
utile
were necessarily linked attributes of the public man, not opposed as they might seem
to be. A person with power over others covered up the inconvenient realities in order
to function honorably. The poet, however, could not embrace the lie; his duty was
to reveal truth even at the expense of his credibility.

Petrarch may originally have acquired his license to simultaneously reveal and conceal
human nature (articulated in poem 5) from Cicero’s definition of etymology: that the
attributes and etymologies of Laura’s name are synonymous. In other words, the varied
outgrowth of forms (
Laureta/Lzaretta, l’aura
/breeze,
laurea/laurel
wreath,
laureto/laurel
grove,
l’auro/gold, l’aureo/highly
praised,
l’aurora/
’dawn, l’òra/hour) and the roots of
laur, lavr,
and
labr,
are all pertinent to his theme. They function as recurring but
ambiguous factors to be explored along with the nature of her idealized qualities,
virtues that will have to be tested through the power of her contrasting effects (to
freeze fire and to burn snow, to bind and to loosen, to harden and to melt) in multiple
ways throughout the
Canzoniere.
But because many of the ingredients of this mix are evanescent or working at evident
cross-purposes, they do not coalesce into belief; instead they are held in abeyance
until the very end of the work as if the poet were waiting for some external force
to materialize by which they might all gain definition.

What Petrarch does with the word
ira
(anger) serves as a good example. As a motivating factor in the
Canzoniere,
anger could not be more important since it combines with his love in a potent mix
vented often as “useless tears” but on some memorable occasions as overt or covert
attacks on his enemies. However, the
ira
that Petrarch inherited from the Provençal departed from the wrathful, sometimes
purifying emotion in Latin to veer into ambiguity, to that feeling aroused in the
poet by a lady who disdains him, namely, a feeling of “distress” or “sadness” close
to sloth (
acedia).
Petrarch restores
ira
to its Latin sense by making it the centerpiece of his Babylon sonnets, poems 136-138.
True, he is obliged to atone for having lost his temper; a series of poems will eventually
follow in which he and Laura share a disabling kind of rage, climaxing with poem 232
in which it becomes clear that he experiences the Latin sense while acknowledging
its limitations as a virtue: when anger arises from righteous indignation with inhuman
conditions, Petrarch implies, it has its uses (Dante said the same in the
Inferno),
but as distress and sadness or destructive rage, it can be a vice. He does not completely
overcome it, in spite of what he says in poem 232. Anger to be used for polemical
purposes simmers just under the surface until late in the work, when in poem 356 he
providentially turns it on himself to cure himself of it once and for all.

Petrarch obviously meant to use some of the language of the long sonnet cycles as
a vermifuge, “a
pharmakon
to be expelled with the other contaminants of his being,” as St. Augustine does in
the
Confessiones
(see Vance, p. 13). Yet what he does with words in the
Canzoniere,
however crudely, always teaches. In poem 360, Love accuses the poet before the Court
of Justice of having sold “little words, or rather lies” when he might have been aiming
for the highest goal, suggesting that he has been deceiving his readers deliberately.
But the writing process, like loving, has its seductive as well as rough and polished
operations; it tends to lead one astray. It becomes clear long before that late canzone
that these deceptive words were meant to act as signals, as small torches lighting
the poet’s way through the by-ways of thought. Always look for the light within the
individual word, he had learned from Virgil, somewhere under the poetic cloud. A word
that is penetrated may yield another life, almost a mythology in itself that might
distract from or serve his essential purpose. Some come to mind:
vendetta, sasso, scoglio, petra, fascio, scaltrire, elicere, scolpire, folcire, scevro,
rappellare, smalto, verga, verace, vena, onore, pena, puro, purpureo, podere;
the ubiquitous
castità, onestà, ghiaccio, laccio, fuoco, leggiadria, esca,
and
albergo.
For example, the
scaltire
(to polish, to make witty or sophisticated) of 125.26 sums up in a word what he has
chosen to avoid doing in the first part of the canzone; but the word also contains
an oblique sense of interiority, inferiority, or deception. Since it allows for more
than one meaning, it serves as a code word. A more subtle line of thought emerges
from turning inward instead of proceeding directly to the right in the text. There
is a metaphoric fabric which he weaves very early; all the old familiar terms of love
provide the groundwork against which he superimposes his figures. These take shape
out of the unusual or unique
terms Petrarch uses to suggest, in their etymologies, the gist of a new line of argument.
The verb form
merco
in 212.13, for example (from
mercare,
to buy), is one of a number of one-time-only terms that flicker with light under
the poetic cloud of apparent meaning demanding to be examined. Yielding several lines
of thought branching from its Latin root (one connecting with the
vendetta
of poem 2) the word can be read deeply not only in its literal and moral senses but
in a rhetorical one as well. He invites us to consider by signaling with this word
a theme he pursues until late in the collection, the economics of love. According
to this science, the poet’s falling in love involves a transaction. The lover offers
his or her emotional and rational life to the beloved as a pledge in the hope that
love will be reciprocated or, second best, that it will offer some measure of glory
and fame for suffering. But a deeper wish motivates the religious poet, and that is
to redeem a measure of faith in faith itself by loving her on into death, making an
imaginative assault on the great metaphor of a reality “beyond.” Like Derrida’s “metaphor
of metaphor” outside philosophical language by which that language is made to fall
short, the ethereal realm lures the metaphysician or poet to overextend himself. He
must describe it in language which has few terms by which to penetrate it, as Dante
demonstrated in the last lines of the
Paradiso.
Dante was forced to borrow from himself, from his own store of humble mortal images,
when approaching the unimaginable point of nonbeing. Such a law of diminishing linguistic
returns applies to the genesis and inevitable abstraction or subtraction of Laura
in the
Canzoniere
(the
hysteron-proteron
of her early death and gradual disappearance). In going beyond her death the poet
can only try to breathe new life into his memory of her material being through diminishing
memory itself and through the insubstantial stuff of dreams.

Petrarch followed tradition late in the
Canzoniere
by describing love’s transaction as imprinting, the striking of a coin (see poems
18, 94, and 110), that is, finally effaced and melted down as he exhausts Laura’s
potential. When he laments in 298.8 that he has “lost the profits of my painful gains”
(and demonstrates this in his syntax), he shows that her death has resulted in a severe
financial setback, forcing him to begin a course of conservation and to operate marginally
until the end.
Part II
of his life, following Laura’s dying, requires an intense reassessment, especially
since he had been unable to settle on a stable value for her in Part I. In several
early poems he demonstrated how ornamentation (idolatry) might be improvident; poem
212, where
merco
appeared, is one of them (see also poems 146 and 157). What he does in the latter
part of the
Canzoniere
is to seek distinctions between the real and the illusory image, the first derived
from love of the “most human” woman, of whom Mary is Petrarch’s highest representation,
the other from love of the symbolic, suggestive, ambiguous, and ephemeral child-woman
he can never possess. He attempts to disassociate his thought from iconographic beauty
(the allure of the image) in order to regain the irreducible simplicity of a redemptive
model. In poem 263, Laura “triumphant” had professed that she was bored with her beauty
and had left pearls, rubies, and gold behind. Shortly after, in poem 267, she is revealed
to have died. For a long time his dilemma lies in the fact that since he still loves
her and by association those worldly goods she spurned, the usual sweet words only
make her immateriality more painfully felt. In later sonnets the richness of his imagery,
which he used as coin to buy the privilege of loving her in Part I, is seen to have
made him poor, giving pleasure only to others. The actual yield with which he is left
is humble: his bed, his aging body, his little fable sadly depleted.

The purging of decorative effects, of grandiose and illusory values, becomes complete
with poem 323, a canzone in which Lauras death is opulently rendered in sixfold form.
As mortal beauty perfected to serve a moral purpose, she could be taken only so far.
Analogy may not substitute indefinitely for idea, nor may symbolic gestures suffice
for acts. Poem 327 begins a winding down, demonstrating as a painful truth how a waning
intensity of hope and desire and a diminishing vision contribute to the loss of lyrical
intensity in his verse—how they distemper it while his faith deepens on another level.
Although the first line speaks of the ancient beauties that once sparked his fire,
the passive voice, past participles, the ordinariness of
l’odore
(fragrance) and
refrigerio
(coolness) stand out as new elements, the poet boldly confronting with these devices
the fire and ice and sudden sweet pain of earlier poems. In effect, prosaic images
slow the pace of his thought, burden it with dark fears, and weight it down with a
reverse power. In the next sonnet,
tepida neve
(melting snow) contrasts with earlier snows, for example, the
tenera neve
(fresh-fallen snow) of 127.43, and the
calda neve
(warm snow) of 157.9, suggesting enervation. With a crablike motion Petrarch inches
his way toward his final negation, poem 332, the double sestina in which he passes
through the mirror of double death possessed only of himself to emerge into a kind
of linguistic minimalism for the final steps of the journey.

These are meditations of one whose expectations are gradually being drawn from the
external to the internal, emptied from Laura in order to sustain Francesco in his
confrontation with his own death. By holding on to whatever verbal ground he has gained,
he seems to pass through pain to achieve a measure of amused detachment from metaphysical
concerns. The last long sonnet cycle of the
Canzoniere,
poems 333-358, for all its apparent high tone, jokes at the expense of mysticism.
In the musings of the long-winded poet making the most of his moment, eking out his
allotted days, Petrarch seems to play with the very foundations of the celestial scene—the
terms built into the language by which we conceive of the hereafter—by dramatizing
himself bargaining with destiny like a character out of Boccaccio, carrying the economics
of salvation to questionable lengths. Although the ultimate test of the worth of these
poems must lie in faith, as metaphysics they create their own ironic frame of reference—like
Dante’s late cantos in the
Paradiso,
they cannot be read literally without severely stretching known categories. Nevertheless,
some of Petrarch’s old moral terms, such as
umiltà, pietà, leggiadria, onore,
and
onestate
are still under active consideration late in the work.
Onestate
(chastity? honesty?
integer vitae?)
proves to be that cloak with which he enfolds the whole in poem 366, where he returns
to sacred texts exclusively, making each referent in his final canzone a link to all
that has come before. At the same time that Petrarch has been calling into doubt the
binding force of language in an age threatened with dissolution, he nonetheless chooses
to end his work by reinforcing its connections with the ancient litanies, finding
permanence in their enduring power to hold mankind in a state of hopeful expectation,
if not literally to save them.

T
ABLE
2. Selected Chronology