Petrarch (4 page)

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.

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 virtue, 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.