The Poetry of Petrarch

by David Young

  Poem 107 concludes that there is to be no escape from the long “war” of love. Everything reminds the poet of Laura, and it’s as if he is lost in a forest of the laurel trees that stand for her. They also stand for his poetry, since he has now written over a hundred poems and crowned himself, in effect, with the classical laurel crown awarded to poets.

  If he’s addressing himself here, he’s also addressing the implicit audience for his poems, which by this point were widely circulated and admired. One member of it is Sennuccio del Bene, a fellow poet who is directly addressed in Numbers 108, 112, and 113. Sennuccio is sympathetic and, as both a fellow poet and a fellow lover, can act as a kind of mirror to Petrarch’s concerns. He’s asked to spare a tear or sigh for the ground where Laura has walked in 108, and in 112 and 113 he is asked to sympathize, to “see how I am treated here” and to recognize that “I half exist.” But Number 113 is rather more positive, since Petrarch is also telling Sennuccio about his refuge from the world. He is writing now about his country home in the Vaucluse region of southern France, a rural retreat where he found solace in nature and solitude but where Nature’s beauty reminded him continually of his love. In 114, 116, and 117 he sketches in the landscape around the source of the Sorgue, where he had his little house, suggesting that his love is more bearable there than anywhere else. Talking about his pastoral retreat also allows him to cast indignant glances toward the corrupt and crowded papal court at Avignon, which he characterizes as Babylon in 114 and Babel in 117, getting in some political licks at a situation he found deplorable.

  In and around these poems is threaded an anecdote about one of his meetings with Laura. In Number 108 he addresses the ground where she has walked, stopping once to turn and look at him. In 109 he revisits the spot where he saw her and gains great peace of mind:

  The visit calms me down, and now those sparks,

  at nones, at vespers, dawn and angelus,

  can fill my thoughts, which have become so tranquil

  that I am free of cares or painful memories.

  In 110 he is suddenly made aware of her presence by seeing and recognizing her shadow. Before he has time to realize it, they are face-to-face, and he is enduring the impact of her amazing eyes:

  the way that thunder comes along with lightning

  that’s how those eyes, so brilliant, hit me,

  along with a sweet greeting from her lips.

  In 111 this episode is narrated further, letting us know that she approached him “where I sat all alone,” that she blushed when their eyes met, then spoke briefly to him and went on. The encounter left him “fulfilled with pleasure” because it was a “kindly greeting” that he got from her for once. By 112 he is complaining, again, to Sennuccio, but rather gently, as also in 113.

  In Number 115 Petrarch returns to the meeting once more, this time to mythologize it. The sun and Petrarch are both Laura’s admirers in this episode, which recalls the myth of Apollo and Daphne (who turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s pursuit of her and thereby gave Petrarch one of his many opportunities for punning incessantly on Laura’s name), and the fact that Laura smiles on Petrarch is enough to make the sun cloud over, “much annoyed at being bested.” His euphoria about this smile carries on into 116, where, as noted before, he introduces us more fully to his valley, with further elaboration in 117.

  In 118 we have a kind of retrospective look at the duration of the unrequited love, and the mixed tone and rueful celebration of this lyric mark the distance we have come in the sequence overall:

  I’ve now passed through my sixteenth year of sighs

  and somewhere up ahead I’ll reach the last one;

  and yet it sometimes seems to me as though

  this suffering began just recently.

  The bitter now is sweet, my losses useful,

  living itself’s a heavy weight—I pray

  my life outlasts this fortune and I fear

  Death may close those eyes that give me speech.

  The time behind and the time ahead are surveyed, along with the worry that Laura might die. The speaker is aware of his contradictions—bitter is sweet, “here” makes him wish for “elsewhere,” a long period of suffering seems to have begun “just recently”—but as the poem draws to its close, what emerges most clearly to him is the fact that in a world of change he has become a kind of constant, something he can cautiously affirm and enjoy. He’s stuck in his love, absurd and unrewarded, but his sixteen years, in which old desires still produce new tears, are acquiring a kind of value he could not have foreseen or understood. The growth of self-awareness and spiritual sophistication that the sequence affords the poet, as mentioned before, is nicely located here in the dynamic between change and constancy.

  The self-criticism, openness about pain and failure, and tribute to the person who can offset the speaker’s shortcomings is the same mixture we can find in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, which helps clarify the way in which it is essentially indebted to Petrarch’s example. In both cases we gradually learn to value what one critic has called the striking “contrast (or fusion) between proclamations of emotional and spiritual turmoil or despair and the classic beauty of the writing, which combines clarity, ease, order, grace and musicality in constantly changing yet internally consistent variations.”4

  * * *

  For a final sample of the pace and texture of the sequence, let us glance at a late group, from 313 to 321. These nine poems belong to the time after Laura’s early death, when Petrarch is mourning her loss, reconciling himself to his own end, and anticipating a reunion with her in Heaven. The mood of the sequence’s late poems is somber and muted, but they achieve, again and again, a powerful eloquence centered on loss, aging, and death, with the poet gaining spiritual understanding as he schools himself for what is to come. In Number 313 we get a taste of how retrospective the poet’s vision has become:

  The time is gone, alas, when I could live

  refreshed amid the fire; the one I wept for

  passed away, the one I wrote about,

  but left me with my pen and all these tears.

  Her face is gone, so sanctified and charming,

  and as it went, her eyes speared through my heart,

  that heart, once mine, which left to follow her,

  as if enveloped in her lovely mantle.

  The self-division treated earlier has become even more dramatic because of the barrier between death and life. His heart, we learn, has gone with Laura, first into the grave and then on up to Heaven. His longing for her, and for self-completion, is now necessarily a longing for his own death. In 314 he addresses his mind, recognizing that it had hints of what was to come, and his soul, which enjoyed the impact of her eyes, “the way we burned together in the moment,” a memory made poignant by the irrevocability of death.

  In Number 315 he gives a thoughtful self-analysis. Before Laura died, he was in fact maturing and changing in a way that would have allowed them a more fruitful relationship, when

  Love could be

  good friends with Chastity, and lovers might

  sit down together and talk naturally.

  That prospect created envy in Death, who is personified as a woman in Petrarch’s world, and she intervened. The next poem continues this theme, adding the lovely image of the cloud dissolving itself in the wind and offering some poignant conjectures—“She might have waited … I would have talked to her”—about what their lives might have been like if they had grown old together. What was anticipated clear back in poem 12 never came to pass.

  Poems 317 and 318 revisit this subject, the first through a ship and harbor conceit, the second through an allegory of Laura’s death as a vision of two trees, one fallen and destroyed, the other transported to Heaven. Number 319 is a moving lament for the passage of time and the loss of the beloved,

  as I go around with graying hair

  all I can think about is what she’s like

  and what it meant to see her l
ovely veil.

  In 320 he revisits her birthplace and feels her death more keenly in the natural surroundings:

  Oh, transitory hopes, oh, crazy thoughts!

  The grass is grieving and the waters troubled,

  the nest is cold and empty where she lay …

  In 321 he continues to meditate on Laura’s birthplace. Seeing it as a “nest” allows him to think of her as a phoenix, rare and rejuvenated, but that miraculous state only leaves him feeling more bereft and desolate, facing a sunset without her, where her “eyes once used to make it day.”

  Again and again in this part of the sequence he returns to his memories of her living presence, dwelling often on their final parting and his failure to understand its significance. Then, gradually, he acts more and more on his knowledge of her current status, in Heaven, celebrating that and longing for death so that he can join her.

  What was once a turbulent rapids has become a steady, majestic river. There is less range of subject and tone, perhaps, but the poems are deeply persuasive in their humanity and curiously comforting in their growing sense of spiritual insight.

  * * *

  One persistent question, not easily answered, is why Petrarch depicts himself so disadvantageously throughout the sequence. His obsession with Laura demeans him considerably, but on top of that we must deal with a self-portrait that continually stresses weeping, sleeplessness, physical debility, naïveté, confusion, and a wounded, bleeding heart. “Get a grip on yourself,” we want to say, “stop indulging in all this self-pity!”

  A partial answer lies in the courtly love tradition, where the poets explored a deliberate subversion of male dominance and courage, making the women powerful and even warriorlike for a change, exploring the borders of gender and toppling stereotypes. Chivalry had two sides, a traditionally male and stoic aspect and its opposite, an unexpected tenderness and vulnerability, and it was the richer for such ambivalence. Petrarch is obviously comfortable with these traditions, and he is writing for an audience that enjoys their paradoxes and the implicit comedy they tend to produce.

  A second answer about the abject self-representation lies in the example of Augustine’s Confessions, which Petrarch as a Christian humanist was adapting to a more secular format. The whole point of such an account is the miserable behavior of the sinner and the concomitant joy and strength when his conversion comes. It was, again, a pattern that Petrarch and his audience found both congenial and powerful. Thus, the worse Petrarch looks as an earthly lover, trapped in the erotic obsessions of his physical desire for Laura, the more powerful the lesson when he eventually trains himself to despise the world and focus on his salvation, not to mention his eventual reunion with Laura in a heavenly setting, where their love is both pardonable and harmonious.

  This is not to say that Petrarch does not complicate the Augustinian pattern, just as Shakespeare, in turn, would complicate Petrarch’s. Sin is more interesting and less clearly evil in Petrarch’s world, and its identity is more bound up with the meaning of its apparent opposite, heavenly salvation. Laura’s beauty is not just a trap, and her attractiveness in this world, which leads Petrarch to a kind of misguided worship and distraction, turns out to be a prefiguring of her heavenly beauty. Far from being totally wrongheaded, his pursuit of her reveals itself gradually as a less enlightened form of what would eventually be both sanctioned and valuable. Erotic love is a training ground, and the lover, while distracted and silly, is also showing good instincts and potential holiness.

  We are dealing, in other words, not with oppositions like good and evil, Hell and Heaven, sin and salvation, but with gradations and phases, with life as a pilgrimage that leads us through error and into well-being. It can be relished as an experience that is both painful and pleasurable, misleading and instructive. So powerful is Petrarch’s personal account of this process and pilgrimage that he shaped a paradigm still viable for artistic employment. We still have sonnet cycles, and we still have bodies of poetry—Emily Dickinson’s is a powerful example—that record the growth and tribulations of the self through time. We are still deeply in this fourteenth-century writer’s debt.

  * * *

  The man who put this sequence together was multifaceted. Greatly respected in his own time as a scholar and classicist, associating with princes of the Church and of the world, often called on to consult in matters of statecraft and policy, Petrarch was worldly as poets go, a powerful presence in the turbulent times that saw Italy fragmented and France made the home of the displaced papacy. Petrarch hoped for, and worked toward, an Italy less at the mercy of rivalries and civil conflicts, and a Holy Roman Empire that would bring greater stability to the civilized world. His efforts were often frustrated, but he never gave up on his political ideals, continuing as a voice of reason and conscience to his generation right to the end of his life.

  He was widely acknowledged as the leading writer of his time. He worked at length on a Latin epic, imitating Virgil.5 He wrote satirical diatribes and verse epistles. He wrote treatises in praise of solitude, reason, and stoic acceptance of the world’s vagaries. He may have been best known for an equivalent of our modern self-help books, the popular De remediis utriusque fortunae (translated recently as Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul). His long, thoughtful letters to his friends and associates were prized and copied, so that he set himself to collecting and editing them for public consumption. As wars, crusades, plagues, and invasions swirled around him, he often retreated to his country home in the Vaucluse. There he contemplated a beauty that was compounded of that rural landscape, Laura’s attractiveness, the classical texts he admired, and the love of God he learned from masters like Augustine and Ambrose. At such times the personal torments associated with the constant feelings of lust in his makeup and the frustration of Laura’s unavailability may have seemed minor in comparison to the larger troubles of the world.6 Being both familiar and manageable, as a source of poetic inspiration, they could allow him to indulge his playful genius and let his artistic skill merge with his most private thoughts and feelings—made public, of course, through the writing and circulation of the poems. A paradoxical man, surely, this Francesco Petrarca, taking his emotional pulse and moral temperature so often, laughing a little at himself as he went. In old age he grew vain and touchy, and more than a little pompous, but by then his collection of poems from his youth and middle years was mostly finished, a project of retrospective polishing and rearranging.

  * * *

  And what of Laura? She is so much the subject of the sequence, so powerful a presence, that we naturally inquire about the historical person. Was she really as good and beautiful as Petrarch portrayed her? Is his account of her his own projection, too unrealistic to have much connection with the actual woman? Did he, perhaps, as one of his contemporaries teasingly suggested, make her up?7

  Many of our answers to these questions must remain conjectural. She existed, surely, and she came from the Avignon area, most probably from the village of Carpentras, where Petrarch lived in his youth. She had blond hair, striking eyes, and considerable composure. She may well have been the Laura—the birth and death dates fit—who married into the de Sade family, a name made infamous much later by the notorious Marquis (a historical irony that would have greatly amused both Petrarch and, one guesses, Laura herself). Her marriage, and her preservation of her honor, seems to have composed the main obstacle to any consummation of their relationship.

  Even the extent to which she may have reciprocated Petrarch’s feelings of admiration is unclear. Sometimes she is kind to him. More often, she is stern, usually because he speaks to her inappropriately of his love. They see each other only occasionally, and these occasions become extremely precious to him. She greets him politely on the street, in passing, and he is enraptured. He sees her in a pageant. He encounters a group of her friends and asks after her, discovering that her husband has confined her to the house. He watches her meet Charles, the Holy Roman emperor. He sees her wi
thout gloves on her hands and wishes to keep a glove. She demands it back, but he cherishes the memory. He walks where she has walked and sits where she has sat, just so he can go on thinking about her beauty and her goodness. From time to time, as we have noted, he commemorates the anniversaries of their first meeting, reflecting with melancholy on how long and how fruitlessly he has loved her.

  Then, in 1348, while he is away in Italy, she dies suddenly, probably of the Black Death that was ravaging France. Thereafter, his grief and his gradual reshaping of the relationship through attention to her presence in Heaven (with occasional visits in his sleep to comfort him) become his primary poetic subjects. As the sequence closes, Laura merges with Mary, of whose goodness she now seems to him to have been an earthly manifestation. That recognition prepares him for his own death and for their anticipated reunion in Heaven.

  To read the sequence in its entirety is to come to feel one knows Laura well, and to admire her for her character. She did not choose to become the object of a famous poet’s rapturous attentions, but having been cast in that role she handled it with grace and thoughtfulness.

  * * *

  The structure I have just described, a two-part sequence with the second half shorter (1–263 and 264–366), follows a familiar medieval pattern, devoted to sin and redemption, as well as the classical plot structure, involving complication and resolution, that Aristotle described. Petrarch kept this basic structure intact even as he wrote and added new poems to it, placing them with more regard to the design of the whole than to actual chronology.8 The main event that characterizes the change is Laura’s death, but Petrarch was careful to start his “resolution” before the news of her death, keeping it on a spiritual as opposed to a material level. It is as if his “conversion” has already begun when she dies, with the death becoming an event that confirms and reinforces his determination to take a new direction.