Petrarch

by Mark Musa

  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.

  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 i
n 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.

  TABLE 2. Selected Chronology

  THE Canzoníere

  1

  Voi ch’ ascoltate in rime sparse il suono

  di quei sospiri ond’ io nudriva ’l core

  in sul mio primo giovenile errore,

  quand’ era in parte altr’ uom da quel ch’ i’ sono,

  del vario stile in ch’ io piango et ragiono

  fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore,

  ove sia chi per prova intenda amore,

  spero trovar pietà, non che perdono.

  Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto

  favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente

  di me medesmo meco mi vergogno;

  et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto,

  e ’l pentersi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente

  che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.

  2

  Pe
r fare una leggiadra sua vendetta

  et punire in un di ben mille offese,

  celatamente Amor l’arco riprese,

  come uom ch’ a nocer luogo e tempo aspetta.

  Era la mia virtute al cor ristretta

  per far ivi et negli occhi sue difese

  quando ’l colpo mortal là giù discese

  ove solea spuntarsi ogni saetta;

  però, turbata nel primiero assalto

  non ebbe tanto né vigor né spazio

  che potesse al bisogno prender l’arme,

  o vero al poggio faticoso et alto

  ritrarmi accortamente da lo strazio

  del quale oggi vorrebbe, et non po, aitarme.

  1

  O you who hear within these scattered verses

  the sound of sighs with which I fed my heart