Petrarch (5 page)

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.

Preoccupation with physical death is perhaps the preeminent subject matter of the
poems in this period (1347-1348), far outstripping others in any quantitative sense.
A transition period in the collection, its importance for the poet is reflected in
the fact that he commemorates the twentieth anniversary of his loving Laura (1347)
twice, in poems 212 and 221 (see table 2). Although
Part II
(poems “on the death of Laura”) consists of one hundred and three poems, the two
hundred and sixty-three “on the life of Laura” fall into the shadow of death more
often than not. It is interesting, in fact, how
Part II
seems to contain so many poems that confirm life, quite as many erotic poems as Part
I, and three canzoni that sing Laura’s praises as beautifully as anywhere, for example,
that on falling in love with love again, poem 270. Grief has its other side; loss
of Laura brings a deepening of devotion and a growing appreciation of friendship,
less self-mystification, and a clearer sense of boundaries. The satire after Laura
dies seems less vitriolic and aims at folk humor or old men’s pleasures. Even in the
final poems, which Petrarch rearranged to show a more spiritual progression (so he
said), his wit remains irrepressible, his consciousness of the
umano
at its peak. Like Cyrano de Bergerac when he is dying, Petrarch’s persona knows when
he finally has the ear of the world and gains his second wind, saving some of his
panache for the end, for those poems that will vindicate him. Style supplies its own
history in the
Canzoniere,
reaching deep into the past in the first part of the work, becoming increasingly
fertile and experimental in the central portion, and turning more toward a common
humanity at the end. Even as he pictures Laura being welcomed as the new queen of
heaven in poem 346, his vision has its lowly components, its ties to the everyday.
Poems 359 and 360 find him humbled, childlike; in poem 361 he resigns himself to the
fact that he cannot buy more life in this world, although love still resonates in
his mind if not his loins; and in poem 363, by deferring the final reckoning to God,
this solitary, elemental man accepts the immanence of his dying.

Petrarch’s heaven in these late sonnets is lowercase, the celestial music soft-pedaled
by a Socratic irony that permits the dying man his commonality, his all too physical
mock-up of the afterlife. In them he falls back on a simple faith unsupported by elaborate
metaphysical systems. Only the stunning apologia of the closing canzone, “Vergine
bella” (poem 366) finally brings vision back from errant wish-fulfillment to the biblical
model of Revelation. And yet while Laura, human love, beauty, and all the hubris and
flare of the struggling poet are subsumed in Revelation’s enduring truth in this concluding
hymn, Petrarch’s tinkering with its symbolism reveals a certain intransigence. To
the very end he shapes form and meaning to reveal in the poem’s numerology an inherent
weakness in his argument, reflecting in the eighth stanza the face of the proud dissenter.
Mary’s integrating force defeats presumption, however, holding him at bay—at the tip
of her foot—and the poem ends with reverence and compliance.

With dismissive gestures, Petrarch seems to cast off Laura in the final poems of the
Canzoniere,
as if he had exhausted her usefulness. Of the three aspects of madonna, only the
motherly counselor remains. Laura as a source of pleasure has faded to a brief sight
in 350.13 and, as a threat of death (Medusa), to a cause for repentance in the re-cantatory
closing poem, number 366. These disparagements of her importance are puzzling, since
it is only natural to anticipate that the Laura he adored and praised from the start
would emerge from the whole body of poems as more than a discredited sign of the poet’s
folly and weakness. The question arises, what reason did Petrarch have for discounting
her other than the conventional one of spurning the “world” and belatedly turning
to matters of the spirit?

In the congedo of the canzone numbered 23, he suggested what it was about his vernacular
poetry that set him apart from the Greek and Latin epic poets he tried to emulate
in
Africa,
his unfinished Latin poem:

Canzone, never was I that golden cloud

that once descended in a precious rain

so as to quench in part Jove’s burning flame;

but surely I was flame lit by Love’s glance,

I was the bird that rises highest through the air

raising the one whom in my words I honor;

and no strange shape could ever make me leave

the first laurel, for still its lovely shade

clears every lesser pleasure from my heart. (161-169)

The flame within, lit by love of Laura and kept burning until late in the work, was
his desire to convey the poetry of praise to the “highest” realm; but no heroes were
to be born out of it as Perseus was from Jove’s “gold cloud” in the myth of Danaë.
The canzone itself, for all the high purpose of its closing lines, is cut off in the
freeze-frame of Actaeon’s flight in its last metamorphosis (Diana’s punishment for
his having glimpsed her naked), as inconclusive as the
Canzoniere
will be upon reaching its final turning toward self-justification in poem 360. A
microcosm within the macrocosm that is the finished work of 366 poems (a plot within
a plot), poem 23 ends with a cri de coeur, but a vain one. Like the silent scream
of Ovid’s Actaeon (“I am Actaeon, I am he!”) as he fled his own hounds in the form
of a stag, Petrarch’s attempts to be heard will be stifled by the very medium in which
he writes. His futile cry will finally be articulated in
360.149 (“Ben me la die’, ma tosto la ritolse” [He gave me her but quickly took her
back!]), as if Petrarch meant to lament that in undertaking to praise his fierce goddess
in bold, concise language he has come up against some other truth, has failed to communicate
her meaning to a ravenous and uncomprehending world, has even in some way murdered
his own creation through his love of her.

The
Canzoniere
demonstrates in particular how sentimental or physical love of woman may seize the
imagination and cause the poet’s desire to speak honestly, of human and divine beauty,
to go astray, becoming disingenuous in spite of itself; and how, when that same love
skirts too close to sacrilege or blasphemy (an underlying theme of poem 23) his efforts
to clarify his meanings lead to obfuscation and irrelevance. In general it shows how
language has been diluted by the derivative and contaminated by the figurative to
the point where its terminology no longer can say what love poets would have it say
without risking misinterpretation or vulgarity—and what is worse, banality. Boccaccio
testified to the more ribald truths in his “Author’s Conclusion” to the
Decameron
(p. 685), defending the “liberties” he took with his stories: