1327 Francesco Petrarca was a learned humanist, a priest, a great collector and reviver of the Latin classics, a poet, an essayist and a diarist to match St Augustine. Together with the Decameron (1353), by his friend Giovanni Boccaccio, and Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1308–21), Petrarch’s sonnets, the Canzoniere, form one of the three pillars of the modern Italian language.
How did he come to write them? The story goes that while in church to observe Good Friday, he first saw a woman named Laura, and fell instantly in love with her. He had recently relinquished his vocation as a priest, but she was married; so the very perfection of physical, moral and spiritual beauty which the poet celebrated in her would prevent her granting his desire.
This predicament was different from the troubadours’ old convention of courtly love, in which the young man falls for his seigneur’s wife, and the two enjoy a clandestine affair. So it needed a new rhetoric to express the genuinely irreconcilable polarities of desire and possibility: classical images of endless suffering (Sisyphus eternally pushing his rock up the hill, only to have it fall back every time); expressions of antithesis, like the Petrarchan trademark oxymorons (icy fire, living death, bitter sweetness); and figures of military advance and retreat.
‘Amor, che nel pensier mio vive e regna’, for example, is a miniature allegory of his love, that normally lives and reigns in his mind and heart, suddenly declaring itself by advancing to his face and planting its war banner there. At such effrontery the lady, who teaches him to love and suffer, and demands that reason, shame and reverence reign in his passion, rejects his advances. At which point Love, weeping and trembling, abandons his enterprise and doesn’t appear again. Then, as usual, the final three lines of the sestet poses the puzzle:
Che poss’io far, temendo il mio signore
se non star seco infin a l’ora estreme?
Ché bel fa chi ben amando more.1
The puzzle here lies in the productive ambiguity. Does ‘my lord fearing’ mean ‘considering my lord is so frightened’, or ‘fearing [i.e. respecting] my lord [as a good feudal subject should]’? However Laura behaves, the poet will be true to his lord/love because it’s been given a fright and because he owes it allegiance. So he will die loving well, or die well, loving, because he is loyal to the emotion – more so than to the lady.
Petrarch more or less invented the sonnet in its quintessentially dialectic form, providing all Europe with a framework for exploring conflicts of all sorts – not only in the paradoxical emotions of romantic love, but also in politics, in work, in friendships, in day-to-day events, in life and death themselves.
1 ‘What can I do, my lord fearing / except stand with him through his dangerous hour? / What a good end he makes who dies loving well.’