Petrarch
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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,
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 pl
ant 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 styl
e 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.
Poem 127 begins a kind of dismantling process of the lovely vision he has just created in poem 126, although it may be the most perfectly constructed of Petrarch’s poems. Third in a series of five major canzoni, it precedes “Italia mia,” Petrarch’s final patriotic effort in which he begs his countrymen to resist decline, warring factions, and narrow personal interests to begin a peaceful healing and restoration of their noble culture. Much that may be puzzling in this canzone is explained in the language of “Italia mia”; what appears to be nostalgia for his youth and innocence is instead a sad commentary on the state of the world as he finds it. Modesty that declined (“that flowered once, then grew beyond,” 1. 40) implies a new reality, the inverse of the sentimental images he summoned in poem 126. An unresponsive Laura seems to represent a world on the verge of being swept away by inexorable forces (see 127.43—48). The snow of innocence melts from the heat of a sun that strikes (percossa) almost cruelly. The eyes dim from this sun too strong for comfort. Laura at hand, reified by the imagination in poem 126, might as well be invisible, “so that forgetfulness means nothing” (54). In comparison with the sensual oblio of his vision in 126.56, the word here seems abstract, relegated to the day he will be delivered of life. And yet Petrarch cannot leave his Laura to languish in this reality; he infuses new life into her beauty with the final lines of the canzone (71-90) so that we may forget what he started out to say, which is that the background on which he paints his palimpsest is infernal. He comes to the end of poem 127 bearing surreal images taken from Scripture, so lovely that they obliterate the vision of the aging woman, the overblown flowers, blinding sun, and suggestion of decadence that came before. He does it repeatedly in the Canzoniere, as if pulling coals from the fire to save for the next day and the next poem, the next envisioning of Laura.