Petrarch
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The young maiden restored to wholeness remains the most enduring figure in the Canzoniere, the one who inspires Petrarch’s most sublime flights—a daughter sometimes joyous, sometimes disdainful, sad or contemplative, sometimes radiant with divine light, in whom he invests his most tender love. Later, the consoling or gently reproving wife and mother will make an appearance, in his dreams after Laura’s death has turned the land into a desert. But another personification, a negative side of Laura, is present as a figure almost as powerful as the daughter: that of Medusa, who might be termed Laura’s death aspect. It is a factor that seems to set Petrarch’s bella donna apart as an anomaly in the romance form for all she resembles and provides a gloss on the cold maiden of Dante’s “stony rhymes.” This aspect of Laura appears to be a mask Petrarch uses in order to deliver an apocalyptic message, making his Medusa figure an icon to be displayed and disarmed. It is as if Laura has three faces: one real that he loves in a creaturely way, one surreal that he fears and hates in a salutary manner, and one entirely spiritual from whom he seeks comfort.
Petrarch needed such an elusive three-sided female persona, one in whom to invest a wide spectrum of meanings; but just as much he needed a male persona whom he might use as a stand-in for himself, a fictional character who would resemble him as poet-lover-seeker (with the traditional sets of reactions these roles implied) but who would also possess vices and virtues familiar to every man or woman as arising from common human stuff. That Petrarch was constructing in his writings a persona distinct from himself out of the materials of his life can be seen in his letters, the Rerum familiarum libri and the Rerum senilium libri. These give an epic account of his life and thought interwoven with what he called the “multicolored threads” of a rich variety of subject matter, amplified in later years with a number of additions that were proven to be fictitious by Giuseppe Billanovich in 1947. In both collections, the Familiares and the Canzoniere, spiritual progress is gained ultimately through reassessment, reorganization and pruning, but also through interpolation of edited and interpretive material that calls attention not only to the individual as a unique person but to the man as a reflection of his time. Such material in the letters, brought into close focus in the lyrics, suggests that Petrarch conceived the idea early in life to style himself deliberately as the Augustinian fated man, one who, at least in part, cannot assert control over his passions, who seeks the new and the strange for its own sake. Behind this mask a more integrated personality relied on the humor, curiosity, and intelligence of his friends and correspondents to read between the lines and decide for themselves if the voice that was speaking was the poet’s or the actor’s. For example, his eye for the absurd and ear for the melodramatic were used to advantage in many instances in both lyrics and letters where he assumes poses that can only elicit disbelief or laughter from the reader, poses of self-aggrandizement, vanity, coy modesty, extreme reticence (masking irony), fussy opinionatedness, pessimism or servility, embroidered upon out of a desire to amuse or teach a moral lesson. The dark unhappy truth was treated differently, however; this was confined to “the middle part,” so-called by Petrarch because of its inherent weakness and tendency to mystification (see Familiares I, I). These were letters and poems written during periods when he could not cope with so many reverses and with the losses to death and misfortune of so many friends and relatives. Like the “corruptible” middle part of Plato’s Republic, they speak of excess, doubt, and labyrinthine suffering.
Petrarch’s self-dramatization goes far deeper than caricature in the Canzoniere. Following the satiric canzone, poem 23, in which a series of transformations forces not only a new and strange conjunction of well-known Ovidian myths but a disturbing psychic break with myth itself, Petrarch seems to shrink from connection with the past in poem 37, to reach a peak of alienation from history in poem 50 (the five stanzas of the canzone a decline of significant models from the dawn to the dusk of poetry), then suggest, with a pretense of drawing the line of skirmish in poem 70 (his manifesto), that the fatal weakness in the organism resides in the nature of love poetry itself. Like Baudelaire, he not only confronts a flawed reality but identifies with it completely, as if the secret to moral renewal were in recognizing decadence as both enemy and nour-isher of art. In the “canzoni of the eyes,” poems 71-73, an early ascent-summit-descent experience, he begins again at the beginning, centering on his first encounter with Laura and her meaning for him but concluding with her essentially limited power to redeem him in a conventional sense. Poems that seem to aim for the sublime, they raise more questions than they answer about the nature of his religious experience and his powers to put a language to it. Perhaps his best-known poetic excursion up the mountain, poem 129, fails in consummation at a half-way point because the poet reaches a plateau where he burrows inward toward a green thought, as if into Dante’s womblike Valley of the Princes in the Purgatorio. From there, where he can still find the form of Laura in his visible surroundings, he regards the high, inaccessible peaks and begins to measure his losses.
This very persona has succeeded in obscuring Petrarch’s message for the general reader over the ensuing centuries. What were clearly radical views in the early and later Renaissance (according to Frances Yates, the heretic philosopher Giordano Bruno used Petrarchan conceits as emblems for his ideas in his hermetic work Eroici furori) lost their sting as time passed, merging with the ancient stream of laments that few still examine closely for their historical targets. Following in the path of Dante, whose Vita nuova created a whole myth about its author with a few sketchy details, Petrarch made his figure easy to stereotype by extending his fiction even into his letters. What must have been required in the way of self-discipline to carry out such a self-parody—to determine the persona who would best express his convictions but in a perverse and cogent way so as to maintain both the absurdity and credibility of his character—is hinted at in more than one passage in the letters where he speaks of the “double task” of maintaining a high moral and philosophical tone while aiming at the lesser art of accommodating to the audience, rhetoric’s aim of winning arguments and impressing the naive as well as the intelligentsia. Such duplicity carries over into poem 28, for example, where he concludes with a joke at his own expense about his first duty, which is to woo the lady while others fight God’s war.
From the beginning Petrarch seems to have recognized that he would become identified with his doppelgänger as his life progressed. In the letter to Giacomo Co-lonna denying that he had tried to “fool the world” with his Laura, he reveals himself in a backhanded manner: “If on this dubious, slippery, questionable course, a man should be so clever, by nature or study, as to dodge the world’s wiles and cheat the world itself, by outwardly resembling the common man but inwardly keeping his own character, what would you say of him? Where can we find such a man? He would need a superior nature, mature sobriety, and much shrewdness in his judgment of others. But this is how you describe me!” (Familiares II, 9). People read his love poems and revered him for the human interest in his story, which then became a substitute for his own spiritual and intellectual self.
Any survey of literary history reveals that Petrarch did not begin with whole cloth when he pieced together the components of his persona. He had available to him a complex set of authorial masks to assume, some of which he unearthed himself from obscurity, others of which were already well known—easily recognized and understood by his peers. The Canzoniere offers itself not only as a log of his time and handbook of lyric forms but also as a textbook of literary topoi—topics which poets and rhetoricians had addressed as far back as the first recorded poem. Durling (p. 9) lists a “repertory of situations” Petrarch inherited from the romance tradition to which he lends his intensely original interpretations: “love at first sight, obsessive yearning and lovesickness, frustration, love as parallel to feudal service; the lady as ideally beautiful, ideally virtuous, miraculous, beloved in Heaven, and destined to early death; love as virt
ue, love as idolatry, love as sensuality; the god of love with his arrows, fire, whips, chains; war with the self—hope, fear, joy, sorrow.” The poet may strike many attitudes springing from the course of real events (since his own history is woven into the fabric of his fiction) but also from states of mind and emotions every love poet was expected to experience. Petrarch seems to have drawn a vast stock of subject matter from earlier traditions; rhetorically there is little of the work that cannot be traced to the literature preceding him.
Some of the prominent themes Petrarch drew from the past include the belief in the divinity of poets, along with the conviction that poets and leaders (capitani) together can raise up humanity; the identification of love with creative vision (the rapture and clear-sightedness of love); claims to be unique in his age symbolized in the Canzoniere by the phoenix; the intention to consecrate the name of the idealized love object, first mentioned in poem 5 and recapitulated in poem 297; the habit of recapitulation itself; vaunting of the anger and pride of the poet genus irritabile vatum)—poses closely connected with a humility that requires silence on the one hand and speaking out about one’s knowledge on the other; affectations of modesty, trepidation, submission, and incapacity (mediocritas mea)—forms of self-disparagement often assumed in imperial Rome (notably by Cicero), in which the satirist makes a gesture of submission to the emperor in order to gain an audience; the consolatory pose “everyone must die”; the pose of the puer senex, or wisdom of age in youth (see poems 182 and 215); self-admonitions to be brief and not cause boredom to the lady (see poems 82,130, and 359); the appeal to those sensitive to sweetness; the invocation of nature and the idea of l’aura as carrier of the bitter and the sweet; the use of the book as a compendium of knowledge patterned as a weaving or mosaic; the habit of enumeration and “erotic intellectual trifling”; inclusion of “rhetorical bravura pieces” in which compendious knowledge is jumbled together (as in the frottola [tall tale] of poems 105 or 135); the practice of listing impossibilities, with a major model in the Book of Revelation; the topos of “the world turned upside down,” alluding to the degeneracy of empire, Church, and monasticism; the satirical use of the feria sexta aprilis (Petrarch’s fateful day of poems 3 and 211), mentioned by Archilochus in reporting the eclipse of the sun on 6 April 648 B.C. as an example of Zeus turning off light because of the evil rampant at the time; and finally the use of the laurel itself, not only for its self-mastering and triumphal symbolism but also for the challenge it carries to the temporal gods (going back to Hesiod’s poet stepping forth in the Theogony brandishing the laurel wand).
Because Petrarch borrowed so extensively from the learning of the past, assuming so many familiar poses, does not mean that he was plagiarizing in the sense that we know it, or even that he was being disingenuous. Unlike any poet before him, he had searched through the libraries of Europe for writings of the ancients which he hoped to bring to renown for the enrichment of all. According to his own literary ethic, he was discovering and giving new life to a continuous tradition that could be perpetuated only by being recast in a valid new form. As a young candidate for the laureate at the peak of his idealism, Petrarch defined this process with the analogy of the bee and honey, learning being a gathering and digesting of history and literature and writing poetry the formation of a new essence. In his youthful days of glory, however, he had not been stung by disappointment. The mature artist seems to have begun to have second thoughts about such a benign approach to the creative process, and the bee and honey image was amplified in the Canzoniere by the cuckoo bird who settles in other birds’ nests (poem 165), the feeding bird watched by a beast of prey, or the fattening lamb awaiting sacrifice (poem 207), the lame ox chasing a breeze (poem 239), or the flashing fish mysteriously deep but contained within green river banks (poem 257). As scholar and disseminator of classical ideas, or as a humble Christian seeking his fortune in high places of intrigue, as a masquerader in other poets’ cloaks, or poet-farmer turning the soil of language with the tip of his pen, Petrarch did not so much select from others as play-act with them metaphorically, especially in Part I of the work.
Although Petrarch’s unearthing of the past may seem like an archeological dig, even necromancy to some, it is made coherent through a painful rethinking and reorganization in and of the poetry of the Canzoniere in Part II, his logic forced by the death of Laura to conform to an order “which, if we keep it in our lives, leads us to God,” as St. Augustine wrote in De ordine. Slowly, painfully he adjusts his style to a more moderate realism, in keeping with expectations newly tempered by events (see table 2, p. xxxv). Unlike Dante’s conversion in “Un solo punto” or Augustine’s sudden relinquishment of self in the Confessiones, Petrarch’s approach is gradual, following a long bumpy road over mixed terrain. In terms of style, his rebirth through self-confrontation may best be described as a kind of syncretism or reconciliation of opposing philosophical and religious principles—that is, as discord in all its ramifications brought to order. A selection of these discordances peculiarly applicable to the Canzoniere would be the manner in which Petrarch disconcerts, bedevils, confounds, tangles, ravels, and dements in the poetry of Part I, remedied by his arranging, disentangling, unweaving, disembroiling, and sieving in Part II. In this sense his mixed styles may all have been to the same purpose, designed as an antidote for taking contradictions too seriously, not only psychological but scriptural ones as well, such as those pagan elements in Christian writings which the Church fathers had never completely resolved.
The palinodic or recantatory poems state the problem. These are mostly sonnets in which the poet seems to give with one hand and take away with the other, as when he begins poem 85 with the words “I have always loved” and poem 86 with “I have always hated,” or when he alternates between joy and despair within the space of a poem. The very first sonnet has been described as palinodic since he discounts an untold number of poems that succeed it as a brief dream of pleasure for which he feels shame. An extraordinary disparity in style and tone may be found in sonnets that follow abruptly one after the other, such as poems 34 and 35, the first an invocation of Apollo and the second a devout elegy that has no apparent connection with what came just before. These disjunctions become less frequent as the work progresses, even rare in Part II (after the series ending with poem 270), but a variety of style remains the rule.
Other characteristic sonnet styles are the epistles, prayers, conundrums, or conceits (a nest or tangle of thoughts artfully woven together), paeans, and anecdotes; the erotic poems, laments, satiric barbs; the bucolic, allegorical, and olympian poems; matched sets of two and three sonnets alluding to the same crisis; poems evoking natural wonders, myths, and great men; interior dialogues, and many poems of sage observation concluding with an aphorism. A typical gesture is the poem that heralds a new turning, either in style or life-course, poem 54 being a prominent example. The first of these sudden departures are poems 2 and 6, followed by so many others that one becomes attuned to their appearances and almost able to anticipate them. However, palinodes, tergiversations, discordances, paradoxes, and oxymorons are the showy displays of the Canzoniere. Equally important but not so startling are the parallels between groups of sonnets (a series in Part I that mirrors one in Part II), logical correspondences within individual sonnets, and concordances or repetitions of individual terms in widely separated poems that trace a generally positive undercurrent in the work, in spite of surface appearances, toward a live-and-let-live openness.
In considering the degree of gravity of individual Petrarchan sonnets, we might ask: does he always write with some major irony or minor puzzle or pun in mind, some bit of jollity hidden by deadly seriousness, or is there always some tragicomic turn waiting to be taken and leading in a direction other than the apparent one? As early as poem 35, for example, a sonnet that has been praised for its beauty and profundity, his self-conscious bearing and gravity of tone seem to conceal from the literal-minded, but not the “knowing” world, an
inner well of joy that threatens to overflow with the allegrezza he claims is missing from his face but which he reveals in lines 12-14. Since he had transformed himself into the laurel in poem 23 (that is, he became the poem), the interfaces of poem 35 are already known to have multiplied. The surface of Lauras face and his meet in the intellect, a green and fruitful place in spite of the wild and inhospitable aspect of the populated world as he finds it. This poem invites us to consider that its inner correspondences may be reversible, as they will be in others to follow which mask joy with sorrow, laughter with tears. (Poem 102 speaks openly about such masking.)
Overtly humorous poems, such as the canzoni numbered 105,119,135, 359, and 360, are gently self-mocking, each one unique in the way it utilizes old material freshly. The mock-heroic sonnet (poems 115,141,151,175-177,180, and 189) seems especially to have delighted Petrarch in the 56-sonnet series that culminates in the canzone numbered 206. (It was in that series also that he began to develop his more sophisticated manner.) Later in Part I, in the 24-sonnet series added in the last year of his life, his humor darkens, his style becomes gothic. (Petrarch did not necessarily add poems to the collection in the order in which they were written. Recent studies [particularly that by Wilkins, 1951] show that he held many poems back until he found a place for them, reworked some until well along in the process, and positioned a number of early poems among later ones according to their style or content rather than their historical sequence. Some of the so-called anniversary poems are out of chronological order within the context of the Canzoniere itself.) Swept by black thoughts and fears of Laura’s death, he descends from a bittersweet peak in 248.2 (“Venga a mirar costei” [Come and gaze on her]) to a place of grief, confusion and sacrifice. In poem 261, when he invites the “ladies” to study Laura’s glory, her qualities and effects seem to add up to zero, in poem 262 to a suicidal and punishing virtue, and in poem 263 to a dangerous impracticality. None of her wonders in poem 261 can be conceived of, imitated, explained, or learned. The ironic sense is gained from knowing that for Petrarch these issues were no joking matter. Although he seems to play with the idea of Laura’s death (in poem 254 he announces that his little favola is complete, his time is up), we know from information he gives us both in the text and out of it that the year of Laura’s disappearance was that of the plague, fate’s way of wiping the slate clean, good and evil alike. He pretends to be unaware on one level, prescient on another, as Boccaccio’s young aristocrats were in the Decameron, exiles from the reality of the plague but unconscious realists to the conditions leading up to it.