Chapter one

The Tradition and the Individual Talents

Some Preliminaries

For all the attention they have evoked, it is a measure of the ground remaining to be won that the closest thing to a critical consensus yet to emerge about Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence is the extraordinary challenge to comprehension the poems present, both individually and collectively.1 Building on the efforts of Empson and Mizener, in his two books, Booth demonstrated, with unprecedented depth, that every one of the sonnets works by an artfully layered superimposition of a great many different ordering systems, one upon another, like the “plastic overlays found in an atlas or anatomy book” (Weiser 11). The poems prove a richly bewildering semantic, syntactic, and rhetorical stew. “Metaphors are mixed, replaced by others, recalled, jostled, interfused, inverted, disguised, dangled, eroded, in ways which blur meanings as they are enriched” (Greene 82).2 Multiple matrices operate within the poems, often jarringly. The tracing of so many patterns, each operating simultaneously but seemingly at cross purposes or in bewildering “suspension” among the others means that the reader must contend with the bewildering fact that “any word or phrase or line is likely to be simultaneously in several distinct relationships with other parts of the poem” (Booth 66). No wonder, then, that Helen Vendler, whose recent book is the most comprehensive close reading of the poems to appear since Booth’s studies, warns that serious engagement with Shakespeare’s lyrics is a “mildly deranging experience” (1) for anyone curious enough to test the artfulness with which they present their complex movements of mind and heart.

As one considers each poem quatrain by quatrain, then octave by sestet, and finally in terms of the couplet’s resolution of the quatrain development, one must “constantly change his idea of the relationship of one part of the poem to another. Each formal division is greater than the one before and each new section relates itself to all of what went before, so that each division acts to obliterate the one that precedes it” (Booth Essay 41). “Obliterate” is surely too extreme a word to use for what happens to one’s sense of the problematics of comprehension in them, but it certainly is not too much to say that the poet forces the reader through a dialectical recalibration of sense and feeling at every turn.

Nor is the interpretive tension each poem generates always resolved as satisfyingly by the couplets as the persona seems to imagine or hopes to accomplish in the pat epigrammatic flourishes with which he assesses his love relationship’s “temperature” at any given point. Critics have long noted how the couplets often disappoint as adequate responses to or even summations of the problematic situations and “torturous shifts in the speaker’s emotions and judgment” (Dubrow Undramatic Monologues 58) the poems detail.3 Often the couplets do not deliver the compelling logical closure they assert. Their arguments, when confident, can hint of self-deception. When self-deprecating, often they cannot definitively be freed from a suspicion of repressed ironic venom. When seemingly selfless in their forgiveness of the beloved, they seem to flinch from a completely honest encounter with the extent of the beloved’s betrayal and, thus, hint of an insecure need to patch matters up at any cost. Even the affirmations of poetry’s power to triumph over time and change “cannot totally displace the mutability they claim to transcend” (Greene 80).

Booth (Essay 130–43) tries to claim general success for the couplets as a means of bringing order and earned reassurance to the poems, but even he freely admits that the couplets almost always “cut . . . away from the body of the poem” (44) and, in the process “ordinarily give the impression that the experience of the preceding twelve lines has been a good deal simpler than in fact it has been” (130).4 When the couplets do not occlude the unresolved emotional and relational tensions to which the poems have made readers privy, at times they announce “inappropriate reactions to what has come before” (Dubrow Undramatic Monologues 63). They often make us “more aware of the stresses that make the speaker seek reassurance than of the reassurance that the couplet, if only by virtue of its innately epigrammatic tone, claims to provide” (63). In yet other instances, the couplets unexpectedly veer away from the poem’s preceding reflections to consider some newly fearful thought or anxiety that has suddenly disturbed the speaker and thus negate any hope for a meaningful resolution in some pithy assessment of the speaker’s concerns. Throughout, though we are wholly focused upon the poet-speaker’s perspective, we “are never sure if it is wholly reliable” (Dubrow Captive Victors 255).

Moreover, as tantalizingly personal meditations, unrelenting in their focus on the poet-speaker’s changeable “inner weather” (Leishman 13), these poems make few if any concessions to our ignorance and expository needs as auditors trying to tune in on the tantalizingly intimate reflections we cannot help but imperfectly overhear upon first readings. This and the often bewildering opaqueness of the verbal registers in the poems’ diction, together with the completely veiled presence of other characters and the absence of any specific setting for the actions they describe, conspire to create the “contextual inscrutability” (Schalkwyk 27) characteristic of so many of the sonnets.5 Booth has aptly noted that a surprisingly large number of the poems put a reader in a position comparable to those into which audiences are initially thrust in the first scenes of certain plays (such as King Lear) wherein the audience comes upon a surprising change in a situation it knows nothing about. In the Sonnets, however, we as auditors are constantly overhearing comments or situations which we know only from inferences inherent in the [speaker’s] comments on them (547). As each poem’s obscure changes of mind and heart displaces the last, the Bard’s artful refusal to provide immediate situational clarity lures the curious into doing much more than their ordinary share of the speculative work of constructing the new dramatic situation.That is to say, our sense of orientation in the speaker’s inner world is based as much on what we must interiorize for ourselves from our own experience or role-play imaginatively as it is one objectively elicited by the speaker’s hazy verbal cues directing us toward their elucidation.

These poems do, for that reason, seem peculiarly “our own,” but that does not mean we identify unreflectively with their speaker in the way we do in the Psalms, as Vendler claims (18). The level of honorific identification between speaker and reader/reciter that such an analogy presupposes elides the often off-putting oddities the speaker reveals about himself in many of the individual poems of the sequence and, even more important, seriously underestimates his problematic reliability in assessing those predicaments, most notably in many of the concluding couplets. Because he is the sole consciousness interiorized in these pronouncements and therefore our only guide to comprehending the states of mind and heart he describes, “we ourselves must [personally] experience the same tumultuous emotions as the speaker” (Dubrow Captive Victors 254) in order to internalize their significance; but our identification with the poems’ speaker is never as untroubled or wholehearted as it is with the speaker of the Psalms. Despite Vendler’s claim to the contrary, Shakespeare does puckishly require readers to become “eavesdropping voyeur(s)” of the speaker’s innermost “sensations” (18) when attempting to re-construe and assess their import.6

Thus it is that we are willingly implicated in a voyeuristic game of hide and seek as we try to peek through each new keyhole seeking to gain some better angle of vision on the poet-speaker’s unorthodox love life. Though the mode of their telling therefore constitutes a humorous form of artistic “entrapment” (Frost once proclaimed delight in “tripping readers head foremost into the boundless”), nevertheless the long history of the poems’ fascination for readers seeking to discover a biographical tell-all in it proves how readily we human beings are willing to be so gulled. In a manner characteristic of Petrarchan love sonnet sequences generally, Shake-speare’s two-part sequence, the individual poems in it, its overtly puzzling dedication, and its odd narrative sequel that in structural and thematic terms “cannot make an end of its ending in woe and desire” (Kerrigan Motives of Woe 1)—all “tease us with a story” (Foster 51), a story tantalizingly just beyond our grasp. The Bard has seen to it that what sense these stories may make—fragmentary or coherent—will necessarily be ours alone to determine. As Love’s Labors Lost argues, a jest’s prosperity does not depend on its teller but on its often befuddled auditor who must re-cognize or be-“get” it again to enjoy the fun and deliver the living burden of the jesting poet’s otherwise lost labor (5.2.848–50).

What Freccero declares of the “scattered verses” (rime sparse 1:1) of Petrarch’s Canzoniere is no less true of Shakespeare’s sequence: “The persona created by the serial juxtaposition of dimensionless lyric moments, is as illusory as the animation of a film strip, the product of the reader’s imagination as much as the poet’s craft” (34). In a very important sense then, when we constitute our image of the persona in individual poems and in the sequence as a whole, it is an unwittingly specular act. The figure we imagine we see as comfortably “other” the Bard is at pains to show us is, in fact, but an unrecognized and ultimately insubstantial reflection of ourselves, a shadowy figure of our own devising whose exemplarity serves, ironically—as it did for Narcissus himself—only as an intriguing promise of a substantial satisfaction perpetually deferred and endlessly frustrated. In this, our experience in reading about these shifting emotional trials and their cumulative import figuratively mirror the poet-speaker’s perplexities over the twists and turns of the relationships he records.

More interesting yet, our untutored initial stance toward him curiously mirrors his unwittingly “self-regarding” and insubstantial engagement with both the fair young man and the dark lady, relationships that he misprizes as genuine and committed “regard” for another. The poet-speaker is both ever captivated and never satisfied by the relationship he attempts to establish and sustain with these love objects—as are we, symbolically, with him. The point to be taken from this is that the Bard is seemingly after much larger game than the one he had already captured so handily when he lured us into voyeuristic fascination with discovering ever more about the lurid and intimate details of his namesake’s tormenting personal passions, only to obscure as much as he reveals, leaving us in the end, like his persona, with only our idle speculations to show for our labors.

More of that momentarily. For now, let us return to our tally of the dizzying number of obstacles to a clear view of the situations these poems dramatize—this time on the macroscopic scale of the sequence and beyond, not simply with reference to the roadblocks individual poems may present. The recognition and explanation of the ways in which the individual sonnets work their bewildering magic is a comparatively recent phenomenon, but the difficulties the sequence presents in its totality have long been the subject of openly mystified comment. So cryptic and bizarre is the dedication to the mysterious Mr. W. H., so tortured and ambiguous its syntax, that many have been led to question whether it should even be attributed to Shakespeare’s hand. Though there is a precedent in Daniel’s Delia for pairing a female complaint with a Petrarchan love sonnet sequence, Shakespeare’s narrative sequel to the sonnets in Q, A Lover’s Complaint, has, until recently, been dismissed as inferior work or ignored completely; either way, it has been presumed irrelevant to the poet’s purposes in the sonnet sequence itself, perhaps because it does not immediately cast any new light on the poet’s own intimate history and preoccupations in the sonnets and because of the seemingly inattentive way the complaint fails to close the narrative frame by which it introduced the unnamed and unlikable female narrator’s tale of self-pitying woe. Or perhaps these two befuddling bookends bracketing the sonnets have garnered such minimal attention in themselves and in relationship to the sequence because to do so would cart coals to Newcastle. Critics have found that they already had more than enough to scratch their heads about in contending with the sonnets themselves, unevenly proportioned and curiously conjoined as they are, without looking for further trouble.

The number of recurring themes, situations, and images in the sonnet sub-sequences does, indeed, hint that the whole is not a miscellany or an “anthology, but a single work of art” (Booth Essay 84). If, however, there is a “pervading sense of relationship among the poems” there is nevertheless also “no consistent sense of progress” (Essay 3). Indeed, as Booth observes, the sequences simultaneously intimate and undermine whatever story they seemingly would tell. The changes in situation and mood between poems often prove “abrupt and their connections obscure” (Cruttwell 112), a fact so disturbing to some readers that it has prodded a number of attempts to re-order the poems in order to make more obvious narrative sense of the sequence, though no one of these rival arrangements has ever proved compelling to anyone but its creator and most supportive friends.

To begin with one of the more striking examples of disjunction in the sequences, why does the poet-speaker suddenly drop the subject of procreation completely and never again revert to it after tirelessly (some say “tediously”) dedicating the first eighteen sonnets to persuading a reluctant male to marry and reproduce himself? The addressee never relents in his indifference to the speaker’s suasion; yet despite the surprising claims in 16 that the young man can “fortifie your selfe in your decay / With meanes more blessed than my barren rime” (3–4), that there is in procreation a “mightier waie” than verse “to make warre upon this bloudie tyrant time” (2), the poet-speaker thereafter deserts that rhetorical front. From then on, he settles for what he has just declared second best in 16. He argues for an ironically anonymous poetic “immortality” he promises—not progeny, but fame’s memorial tomb to an unknown lover—as a means to contend with time’s ravages. Even if Shake-speare could deliver on his promise, it would be a Pyrrhic victory, however, because he unaccountably neglects to etch in the name of the young man in the shrine at which he would have future generations worship.7 Nor does he celebrate any magnificent deeds for which we might justify his young friend’s living on to preserve the heroic example of love’s virtue in perpetuity. When the young man isn’t busy betraying others who love him, the most noteworthy thing we learn about him is that he is so self-absorbed that the sole means by which the persona might induce him to procreate is to feed his narcissism by repeatedly arguing that he should beget an heir as a mirror in which to behold and admire himself.8 Boastful claims for the power of the poet-speaker’s art to immortalize recur intermittently throughout the initial sub-sequence; but once the rhetor has undergone the dark meditation on the absolute sway of mutability in things natural and human dramatized in 64, it is difficult to imagine by what means he will overcome or dismiss the existential gloom to which he has penetrated in that pronouncement. There his long view seemingly lays bare the fault lines in any and all hopes of human persistence, let alone personal triumph in the transcendence of ruin and decay. Yet in some convenient form of amnesia he goes on to do so again and again—incredibly, even in the very next poem, the much admired 65.

Only two poems into the sequence declaring his passion for a dark lady, the poet inserts into his account a withering anatomy of lust in 129 that douses the romantic embers ignited by 128’s witty, if conventional plea for a kiss from the woman with whom the speaker frankly admits being smitten. Then, in the following poem, the speaker fashions a bravura blazon of his dark mistress’ unconventional glories as if he had not just enunciated a clinical depiction of the maddening hell-torments passion involves, though the repetition of key phrases from 129 in 130 cannot help but drizzle on the parade of unorthodox merits in his mistress the speaker trumpets here to entertain and impress unspecified auditors.

The speaker of 73 and 74, in pleading for special attention and “memorial” remembrance from the beloved, performs a mystifying about-face from the poet who in the immediately preceding poems urges the addressee to “for get me quite” (72:3) after his death, letting “your love even with my life decay” (71:12). At which point are we supposed to take him at his word? The speaker of 138 boasts of the perfection of the compatibility between himself and his dark lady, each knowingly lying to and with the other, thus together maintaining a perfectly harmonic equanimity as they flatter each other, neither of them in the slightest bit taken in by the other’s flattering lies. But this decadent patina of knowing sophistication and equanimity in happily maintaining the erotic “lie” of their relationship lasts only until the bitter howl that introduces the very next poem, occasioned apparently by the lady’s callous willingness to flirt with other men openly in his presence. Since 144 clearly represents the peak of bitterness in the speaker’s relationship to the dark lady to that point in the sequence, one might assume that the following two poems signal a definitive turn in the relationship (or at least in the speaker) toward a new and more ennobling plane of experience. Given the faithless triangulation in 144 and both the depth of the speaker’s abject anxiety in it and the murderous bitterness toward friend and mistress alike with which it concludes, 145’s jaunty tetrameter account of relief and reprieve delivered by a female beloved’s unexpected “mercie” (5)—the first and only sign of it in the sub-sequence—certainly comes out of the blue. This surprise intensifies exponentially if one accepts the possibility that the beloved woman alluded to in the poem may not be the dark lady at all but, astonishingly, Anne Hathaway, the poet’s wife, whose patronymic and given name may be punningly insinuated in the final two lines. This surprising turn of events is, in its turn, followed in 146 by a contemptus mundi consolation in which the speaker seemingly attempts to persuade himself to resign his attachments to the faltering flesh and “sinful earth” (1) in favor of the salvation of his soul. However, in yet another abrupt volte face, this shift from a romantic to a seemingly spiritual register does not prove to be the palinode it promises to be; instead 147 to 152 definitively revert to the subject of the speaker’s ever more maddening obsession with the dark lady’s erotic enticement, exposing paroxysms of fevered longing for her so intensely focused and unqualified that it makes one wonder what could have happened to the reflections that the speaker had so valued in 145 and 146.

Perhaps the most abrupt and perplexing about-face of all, however, is the way each sub-sequence inexplicably and abruptly breaks off. To state the matter in the most simplistic terms possible, Shake-speare’s sonnets are all poems that center upon unrealized desire. Collectively, they represent “variable passions throng[ing]” the speaker’s “constant woe” (V&A 967), a “constancie” ever “confined” (105:7): the futile effort to conquer the degradations of time and change. His reflections obsessively revert to the dual threats to his passions’ vigor—mutability in nature and inconstancies in interpersonal relations. His poems are then, indeed, “all one, ever the same” (76:5); that is, they are, in their seemingly endless variations on the same theme yet “so far from” any “variation” (76:2) at all. Like certain measures of time’s meaningless circularity—repetition without development—every “word” in them “doth almost fel [fell? sell? spell? tell?] my name / Shewing their birth and where they did proceed” (7–8), not only because they are all recognizably the work of one hand and spirit, but also because at heart Will/will (himself and itself) persists in them in an unyielding effort to persuade his two seemingly faithless love interests to comply with his suasion. Until the abrupt termination of each, Will’s efforts continue with the same insistence unabated “always” simply “dressing [and addressing] old words new” (76:11) in the service of the same goal; but in 126 and 153–54, the speaker reverses himself and breaks off his efforts without explanation, implicitly confessing to a stymied Will/will in both instances as he consigns all his previous labors to the wastes of time as a waste of time, much in the manner of his most famous models, the poet-speakers breaking off the Vita Nuova and the Canzoniere.

After spending the better part of the first sequence arguing how progeny and then the “immortality” of literary fame are the means by which he can preserve the love he feels for the fair young man, in the six pairs of couplets of 126 he contradicts himself and seemingly yields the “sweet boy” up to a personified Nature who cannot “keep her treasure” (10) and must instead “render” (12) him up to Time. The fair young man has implicitly shown by his silence throughout that he could put off the speaker’s request for a satisfying and fruitful response to his expressions of desire indefinitely; but once the poet-speaker has yielded his beloved to Nature and death in time, the speaker affirms with (one presumes) ironic bitterness and frustration that, unlike his, “Her Audite (though delay’d) answer’d must be” (11) by the young man’s demise. After exercising great ingenuity throughout the first series finding ways to excuse any and every betrayal and willingly enduring any humiliation to maintain some semblance of a relationship to the young man, in 126, without warning, he seemingly throws in the towel and deserts the relationship for no clearly expressed reason whatever.

In the shorter sequence, after unflagging efforts to define his relationship to the dark lady on terms more to his liking, in the concluding anacreontics, a matched pair of flippantly lewd jests, the frustrated speaker simply yields up any further effort to bend her to his will. Instead, in bitterly self-satisfied complacency and sly resignation, he confesses his “venereally diseased” thralldom to a femme fatale he has come to despise, even though he still cannot resist her allure. Then, in the narrative poem to follow, A Lover’s Complaint, the unnamed female narrator simply plays Echo to the sequence’s Narcissus. Having recounted how her lover had seduced and abandoned her, she suddenly breaks off her account with the surprising confession that despite his vile perfidiousness to her she would, if she could, once again gladly allow him to “again betray the fore-betrayed / And new pervert a reconcil’d maid” (328–29). Though “every word” in the sonnet sequences “doth almost fel my name / Shewing their birth” from an autogenetic, ever troubled Will/will, his is, indeed, likewise always a “verse” that remains “barren of new pride” (1). This need not be, as the speaker smugly imagines, because he takes pride in his constancy and seemingly innocent insistence upon his own purposes but because, more self-impugningly, each pronouncement to which Will/will gives birth is delivered stillborn; his labors, seemingly fruitless. In the Trionfi, Petrarch characterizes Narcissus as a beautiful blossom that never bears fruit. His “constancy” to an idealized object—a figure of his own devising, mind you—is a dimwit’s self-regarding beauty that within itself is wasted until it is completely blighted by this all-eating canker within. In the last lines of 76—“For as the Sunne is daily new and old / So is my love still telling what is told” (14)—the poet-speaker clearly thinks he is taking legitimate pride in the enduring and nurturing constancy of his love. What he does not seem to realize, however, is that what he says there can be taken to mean that every new verse he has written or will proceed to write repetitiously tells the same tired old story of his will’s barren insistence. Their progress, individually and cumulatively, is no less circular and meaninglessly sequential than the sun’s repetitive diurnal aging as it journeys across the sky; his verses’ movements, like the sun’s, little more than markers of lost time’s meaningless passage, speech that, like a church steeple bell’s pealing of the hours, still tells what is “tolled”—merely tolling time’s wasting passage and with it the death knell that awaits him and inattentive auditors alike: Love’s labor lost.

The Dantean and Petrarchan Prototypes

Vendler rightly notes that the only “coherent psychological account” of reading these poems is that they “exist to frustrate” (3); but that in no way indicates that the Bard was inattentive to meaningful narratological purposes because he was so wholly absorbed with the local rhetorical dimensions of these exasperatingly subtle lyric meditations individually. It argues, rather, that frustration in both the persona and in its readers is for Shake-speare’s artificer a crucial thematic irony and rhetorical trap laid in the mock-heroic exemplary narrative or speculum morale the poems symbolically fashion in their curiously repetitive, echoingly circum-locutional narrative. As in the Vita Nuova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and the many British sequences to descend directly from them in turn, Shake-speare’s own seemingly “scattered verses” (Canzoniere 1:1) together tell but a single tale, the same fallen tale that all the sequences recount of an idolatrous displacement of the true Deus who est caritas by an empty and futile yearning and decision to worship a strange god the poet-speaker puts before Him: the “human idol . . . Cupid” (Greville Caelica 62) whose dart “an image is which for ourselves we carve” Pygmalion-like, “And, fooles, adore” (A&S, 5:7). It is the worship of a “senseless” fetish, the autoerotic icon of the Petrarchan speaker’s simultaneously idealizing and degrading creation. This “divine” facsimile each new Narcissus spawns autogenetically is an unresponsive “iron idol that compassion wants” (Constable, decade 4, no. 4).

Far too often and for far too long, readers and critics have innocently assumed that in this tradition the “iron idol that compassion wants” is simply the sacred cow herself, la belle dame sans merci. (Shake-speare’s young man merely adding le beau homme sans merci to the mix.) But the blasphemous sinner cannot be the golden calf itself, but only the dim-witted, darkly comical artist-figure who, in the manner of Pygmalion, his archetype, fashions and then bows down before it, attempting to embrace an inert image of a woman. The iron idol that compassion wants is not so much the “idolized” beloved as it is the Petrarchan poet/lover himself who, in his self-deifying art and self-regarding obsession with his “want” or “yearning” for compassion from the beloved can find no room for anything or anyone else in his self-preoccupied and unresponsive heart—so much so, in fact, that he “wants” or “lacks” true compassion and genuine fellow feeling altogether, even enough to stop torturing himself in the way that the sequences repeatedly demonstrate he alone lives to do.9

In Will-I-Am Shake-Speare’s sequence, the masked truth is that the idolized woman in the shorter series is deemed “black as hell” (147:14) solely by the speaker’s uncorroborated report. The real shade of her complexion and her soul’s darkness can never be definitely established by readers; but what is not moot is that in the poet-speaker’s ever more corrosive bitterness and pique toward her she does, indeed, become a “woman collour’d il” (144:4) in his verse.10 Likewise, in the first series, the narcissism the speaker repeatedly postulates in the fair young man cannot definitively condemn the addressee with anything like the certainty with which the poet-speaker damns himself in forwarding none but self-serving—indeed, morally odious—reasons for urging the young man to reproduce himself.

The poet-speaker urges the addressee to marry only in order to find “some vial” (6:3; note the misogynistic pun on “vile”) to hold the distilled “treasure” of his “beautits”—or penis’—seed. He encourages the addressee to reproduce himself in a child, conceiving such a child—and conceiving of it—only as an inferior “coppy” (11:14) whose sole value is its dim reflection of the original glory of the young man’s “Image” (3:14). He urges a profiteering usury (“That use is not forbidden usury / Which happies those who pay the willing lone” [6:6; see 4:7–14]) as long as the young man can find a female dupe “happy” to be taken advantage of in this manner for his pleasure and profit, even though over time she will clearly have to pay exorbitant interest on the loan she may be only too pleased to incur now. Given the poet-speaker’s failure to identify the figure he would memorialize in his art by name or to provide any virtuous pretext for immortalizing him, the persona’s unacknowledged motive in the gesture could well be a secretly self-gratifying one that imagines the beloved will treasure and appreciate the speaker more on account of his perspicacity in valuing him so. Certainly the poems themselves have dramatically less to do with the figure the speaker purportedly would divinize than they do with the quasi-divine power the speaker boasts to confer immortality upon another, and through that—by sheer coincidence, of course—upon himself as well.

When the poet-speaker declares: “two loves I have of comfort and despair” (144:1), he does not realize that he may be confessing a truth far more significant than his fear that his friend and mistress may be betraying him in each other’s arms. In saying so, he confesses, with dramatic irony, to a faithless self-division throughout both sequences, wherein he compromises the purity of his affiliation or “engagement” to each of these emotions within in his faithless dalliance with the other, and vice versa. In the longer sequence, even in the very comforts he tirelessly offers to the young man (and himself) his verse cloaks an underlying, if unwitting, despair. In the shorter sequence, conversely, he is always stealing secret comforts for himself even in the despair he experiences ever more deeply in the corrupted relationship he maintains with his dark mistress. In both relationships, his is the corrupted form of rude Will/will Reason in the Roman identifies and condemns as “disloyal loyalty and despairing hope” (94). The two loves of comfort and despair are not so much the creatures he thinks he worships as they are the corrupted and divided nature of his desire for each of them.

The Petrarchan poet’s choice of amorous servitude prostrate before a false and hollow idol of love, arbitrarily made and not begotten, in preference to the liberating service of the most high, the true worship of the divine plenitude—“begotten, not made,” in its generative power and capacities—is not the annunciation of a revolutionary humanistic religion of love threatening to displace the venerable theological truth and tropes the tradition conventionally parodies and usurps. Rather, as the unfailingly unsatisfactory results of their obsessive poetic litanies of devotional incantation insinuate, it is a tragi-comically self-crippling, life-denying fiction of the Petrarchist’s own fabrication, a conclusion strongly supported by the unusual number and persistence of allusions to Narcissus and Pygmalion, first figuring prominently in the tableau dedicated to each of them in turn in the first and last books of the Roman de la Rose and then reappearing with allusive consistency in one sonnet sequence after another thereafter. Just behind the dead seriousness with which the poet-speakers in the tradition take their idealizing objectifications of the womanhood they vainly strive to embrace—à la Apollo pursuing Daphne—lies the symbolic likeness, in their lives and in their art, to Narcissus and Pygmalion’s futile efforts to embrace the iconic creations of their own minds and hands. Ironically, the only thing the “vain conceit” (Greville #41) of their solitary narcissistic souls can duplicate is the “vain conceit” of their Pygmalionic art.

As Burton describes it in The Anatomie of Melancholy (that curative dissection of the high-minded Petrarchan “love-sickness” of heroical lovers) “fictions make men love” and, in turn, “men in love” then “make fictions” in the verses they then feel duty-bound to pen in order to argue the worthiness of their devotions. One can never clearly determine whether this “worthiness of love” they celebrate refers more to the intrinsic value of their beloveds or to the putatively noble and distinguished quality of their own passion for that beloved. As Valency long ago recognized, it is in terms of his own self-love that the Petrarchan poet sees his beloved: “In the superlative worth of the lady, the lover finds the surest guarantee of his own preeminence. . . . The lover’s compliments, like all self-flattery, are therefore utterly sincere” (26). Finding that the only way they can reify and ratify the purported value of their tenuous private fantasies is to parade them publicly with much fanfare in their verse ad nauseam, they never learn that to speak of love alone is, indeed, but love’s labor lost.

Petrarchan protagonists, languishing ever frustrated, live only for the paradoxical “joys of near [and, in a comical pun, ‘n’er’] enjoying” (Caelica #40), titillating and chafing themselves onanistically without “realizing” or fully engaging their beloveds or the cost of their inane attachments to the sacred cows they worship. Daniel speaks for them all when his persona declares of Delia (note the near anagram of the author’s name, a sign of “narcissistic self-projection” [Duncan-Jones 89] in his regard for the beloved):

And yet I rather languish in her love

Then I would joy the fairest she that liveth.

I doubt to finde such pleasure in my gayning,

As now I taste in compass of complayning.

As Burton puts it in a pithy antithesis, this wan, “heroical” kind of “desire wishes” (asserting its will though thwarted in its yearnings); by contrast, any actual and greater “love enjoys” (A of M 618). Genuine love generates, not the rarified insipidities that echo hollowly through these variations on the Vita Nuova, but an incarnate vita nova in that “love is a babe” (115:13). In Petrarchan iconography Cupid or “Love” is a babe as well, to be sure; but the love the Bard and his fellow poets, each in propria persona, would have us come to know and worship (in 115 and in the appreciation of their satirical mock-encomia collectively) is not this perverse and changeable little wanton who but “an image is which for ourselves we carve / And, fools, adore.” Their “babe” is not a being who delights in randomly and relentlessly pricking on individuals with the inflaming darts of desire; it is a living spirit born in an ongoing connection and intimacy between individuals who share their lives completely with one another. It is neither of the self-willing individuals themselves but a living link between them to which they subordinate themselves, a living link generated in their fully human intercourse mutually enjoyed, a vital new being that, granted the care that caritas requires, can be nurtured and cultivated into the “full growth” (115:14) of the sempiternal Rose (1:2), not blighted in its budding strength from within by the canker of cupidinous desire. The Petrarchan poet-speaker’s false hopes and false despairs, his “vane speranze” and “van dolore” (Canzoniere1:6)—or in other words, the smiles and tears of Narcissus—annihilate this procreative power of love; its only fruit is the “waste of shame” (129:1; see Canzoniere 1:11–12), the rose pudoris Amant vainly pursued in his blind ardor. Seemingly ever more near to enjoying the object of his desire in his frustrating travail, in the end Amant wakes into disillusionment from his long wet dream to find that it is to have no meaningful climax because he has “n’er”—but only “near”—enjoyed having her. At the close of the Roman the rose of its protagonist’s pursuit remains tantalizingly beyond his grasp: in his self-satisfying dream and wish fulfillment, he has only been embracing himself.

To put the matter in a related way, the Petrarchan lover can be likened to Ixion on his wheel:

to my Juno vow’d

With thoughts to clip her, clipp’d my own desire:

For she was vanish’d, I held nothing fast

But woes to come, and joys already past. (Caelica #42)

Ever true to Narcissus in his “rueful constancy”:

While I the image of myself did glass

Thought-shadows . . . for beauty did embrace

Till stream and all except the cold did pass

Yet faith held fast, like foils where stones be set

To make toys dear, and fools more fond to get. (Caelica #42)

Unlike fruitful engagements in love, the Petrarchan poet’s idealized form of desire can only beget more of the same—hence the mind-numbing impression of a broken record readers are meant to endure in the echo chamber of the Petrarchan speaker’s poetic pleas within any given sequence. Hence the impression the sequences collectively leave that, as Jeanroy observed, for all the purported uniqueness of their respective “goddesses,” “one is tempted to believe that all the poets loved the same lady” (Goldin vii).

Their “rueful constancy” is a hunger that only feeds on itself, a thirst that intensifies with what it continues to drink, ever more drunk with itself. Theirs is a yearning whose sole and essential characteristic is its willful persistence in a woeful folly: the solipsistic and fruitless circularity of dogs chasing their own tails. If a commonplace lust is the lethal desire of the moth for the flame, “heroical” love, the objectification of woman, not as whore but as idealized goddess or “madonna,” is the equally futile and self-destructive lust of “the moth for the star” (Valency 144), a phenomenon Greville properly identified as “lust disguised with devotion” (Caelica #86), however stubbornly and bravely its devotees continue to imagine it noble. Alluding to Sidney’s Astrophil, Greville declares “stargazers only multiply desires” (#17). Theirs is the kind of passion Marvell was to describe as one begotten by despair upon impossibility. It is the canker within the rose, the unremitting hunger and thirst that would ever merely indulge or feed itself until whatever narcissistically self-regarding “beauty within itself” it once enjoyed is simply “wasted” (V&A 130) away to nothing as it echoes dyingly throughout each sequence. Ordinary lovers may find their delight in one another; Petrarchan desire, a lust within itself it hides, “still in herself finds her delight” (Caelica #16), the chafing and yet self-delighting “joy of neare / n’er enjoying” that persists until, numbed to all feeling, it can no longer delight itself even in this. In a letter, Petrarch once identified the “scattered verses” of his Canzoniere as nugellas or “foolish trifles,” a word whose etymological root means “seeds.” Thus he indirectly hints that his persona is a comical figurative spawn of Onan, wastefully scattering seed where it cannot flourish. Burton extends this satiric wit in his parting advice to the devotees of heroical passion in the Anatomie. Coming succinctly to the point of his healing, generative wisdom about love, he ends his massive tome with a tart injunction: “Be not solitary, be not idle” (970).

We can reconfirm this summary with a more detailed inspection of the twin pillars of the Petrarchan tradition. In very nearly the first words of the Vita Nuova, Dante’s self-preoccupied persona mysteriously declares that the woman of his dreams “was called Beatrice by many who did not know what it meant to call her this” (29). One among the “many” ironically turns out to be the poet-speaker himself, who, not a page later, reports further that the spirit of his senses, speaking especially to the spirit of his vision, declared “Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra” (30) when he first caught a glimpse of Beatrice. The Latin phrase is usually translated as “now your source of joy has been revealed,” but it could just as well be rendered “now your own beatitude or bliss seems to appear.” If so, the speaker has already unwittingly elided the very person of Beatrice, whose name means “she who blesses” or “female bliss, happiness, or beautification” into her beatifying effect on himself—that expectant yearning awakened in him for the salvific good she might be capable of providing him at no expense of self.

Later, in chapter 24, the persona declares that Love himself seems to tell him: “Anyone who thought carefully about this would call Beatrice Love because of her great resemblance to me” (71); then in the sonnet this comment is meant to gloss, the Cupidinous deity he worships speaks, declaring, “She who is my image has my name” (71–2). Since we now have heard from later poets in the tradition that the little love god the speaker worships is but a human idol, an “image” he carved for himself “and [now,] fool, adores” (A&S 5:6–7), it is clear that the cupidinous god he worships might well be but his willful self. When the speaker here identifies Beatrice with Love himself, he unwittingly confesses that he has completely occluded her otherness in his “loving” interest in her as a wish-fulfilling rescue fantasy.

The deep truth, then, is that “she who is my image”—that is, she who is his narcissistic reflection, a wholly objectified image in his own mind—does indeed have his name more than she ever has, or answers to, her own in the book. She is not herself to him, but only what he may say and believe she is. At the outset, he confesses that from the moment he saw her, his soul was “wedded to him [in other words Love],” not, significantly, to Beatrice herself in love. Indeed, by his own declaration, the complete “mastery” that Love has over him owes primarily to the “power which my imagination gave him” (30); in fact, Beatrice is the “gloriosa donna de la mia menta.” In thinking he is merely describing Beatrice herself by saying so, he unwittingly identifies by its proper name his obsession with a private fantasy that unfolds and persists throughout the book, a fantasy whose level of involvement in and focus upon his own conflicted feelings does not change appreciably whether Beatrice herself is absent or present, alive or dead.

The consistency in his tone of self-preoccupied longing and woe, apparent in both the in vivo and in morte subsections of the sequence, shows that the speaker truly could care less about whether Beatrice herself is alive or dead, since all along and in every modality her only purpose is to be the grace by which his soul might gain its own transcendent wish, regardless of his virtues or lack of them. His description of his “pitiable tears and anguish” at her passing (ch. 31) exactly mimics the pitiable tears and anguish repeatedly voiced while she was still very much alive. In propria persona, Beatrice is as much a figurative “screen” lady as the unknown woman whose reputation, social worth, and even marriageability the poet-speaker had cavalierly compromised and thoughtlessly sacrificed in order—for “self-regarding” purposes—to hide his true love from discovery in the literal narrative; not truly the object of his deepest devotion, she remains but the idea of a special favor he hopes to keep for himself (and from self-acknowledgment) regardless of his merits or cost to others. From the beginning, then, the poet-speaker unknowingly confesses to the reader that it is a sublimated cupidity and not a woman he adores. He worships his own beatitude rather than Beatrice herself, the real woman whose human presence he cannot figuratively endure any more than he can endure it literally in his lovesick expressions of petrified longing.11

In the Vita Nuova we came to know next to nothing about Beatrice beyond her politely cordial initial smile in passing to the speaker and her frowning withdrawal of approval when she discovers some discourtesy that he has done to the screen lady. She cannot be considered in any sense a full-bodied, characterological portrait but only a paradigmatic allegorical idea, strongly reminiscent of conventional depictions of Dame Fortune herself as a changeable figure given to smiling haphazardly upon men only just as arbitrarily to frown and withdraw her favor. Her foolish devotees then have little choice but to spend every waking hour, if necessary, in the pathetic hope that they might one day enjoy her favor yet again. A clear sign that Dante himself conceived of Beatrice’s effect on his persona in the Vita in these abstract, impersonally comical terms comes in the Convivio from his surprising identification of the sympathetic mistress with whom the poet-speaker conducted a short-lived dalliance after the death of Beatrice as an incipiently Boethian “Lady Philosophy” promising to offer wise consolation once he had lost all hope of future blessings from Dame Fortune herself in life.12 The protagonist’s decision to turn his back on this figure because she soon came to represent in his mind a betrayal of his love yearning for the woman of his dreams demonstrates that the artist who fashioned this persona has concluded that even at the close of the Vita Nuova the poet-speaker’s passion for what he imagines Beatrice to be—some as yet unrealized windfall from Dame Fortune, now transposed to a transcendent plane of experience—yet remains a profoundly blind incomprehension of Beatrice’s true human identity and worth. That incomprehension will not be remedied until the conclusion of the Purgatorio when he encounters her once again on very new terms, terms that for the first time she has the opportunity to set and voice.

No one fresh from a reading of the Vita Nuova would be likely to predict the figure of stern maternal rebuke awaiting Dante and his curious readers in Purgatorio 30 and 31. Upbraiding him like a mother whose son has been caught in some shameful act, she calls him sternly out by name, demanding first that he “Look at me well: indeed I am, indeed I am Beatrice!”: for the first time in the poet-speaker’s experience insisting that she be identified by her own name and acknowledged without ambiguity as her own person. No smiling reunion with a long-lost beloved, this is an unexpected demand from a loving parent to an immature child she still cares for despite his folly, a wholesome demand to face his own shame for an undisclosed offense. Strangely, however, the “crime” she names most immediately is nothing more than her ever-moping devotee’s quest to be reunited with her among the blessed in heaven (“How hast thou deigned to approach the mountain? Didst thou not know that here man is happy?”), this despite the fact that at the Comedy’s inception, when Dante, lost, had nearly despaired of continuing to seek the path of “right,” only Virgil’s appearance, declaring that Beatrice herself had sent him to guide the fearful postulant, nerved him for the quest that has brought him to her here. Dante’s reaction to her unexpected rebuke seems equally counterintuitive. Instead of some surprised expression of consternation at the apparent bait-and-switch that Beatrice has sprung on him, Dante is stopped dead in his tracks, abashed. The poet of the Vita Nuova who lived habitually for and in his own words is at a loss for them now. “My eyes fell down to the clear fount [the river Lethe divides them]; but seeing myself in it I drew them to the grass, such great shame weighed on my brow.” He remains unable to respond to his questioner or even look her in the eye. The allusion in his words here to a Narcissus suddenly struck with guilt and shame suggests that though he may not realize fully how or why, and even before she delivers a bill of particulars against him that he can understand, he nevertheless feels the weight of a sin of selfish self-regard for which repentance and restitution are in order. Absent any specific actions for which he has yet been reproached, it can only be some failure toward Beatrice herself that has awakened this inarticulate shame in him. Something in her very “presence” now confounds him with the sense of his own guilt, whereas previously it had always confounded him only with his own fear of displacement from her beneficial regard. His guilt can only be his continuing failure, however dimly felt, to acknowledge her as a separate and equal personal presence in his world rather than as a self-glorifying grace, something her subsequent reprimands make clearer. Her specific rebuke then goes on to declare his youth (his “vita nova,” 115) misspent, especially after her death. When he saw, by virtue of that death, that what gave him “supreme pleasure” (31:238) on earth could die away, she declares he should have been led, not to wish for a romanticized erotic reunion with her transposed to a new and happier locale, but “upward after me” to yet higher things, led by her example to the true worship of the divine. Instead, she maintains he mistakenly continued to worship “false images of good, which pay no promise in full” (30:235), much like the pagan Narcissus staring happily at his own reflection or the chosen people honoring in prostration brazen images they themselves fashioned.

In their reunion and in the yet more surprising transformation Beatrice makes in the Paradiso, even her presence before him now turns out to be a false image of good that will not quite fulfill the hopes he had dreamed of even though he does faithfully cling to it in his confusion of heart. Furthermore, thanks to the clever pun directly linking the Dantean surrogate’s misspent youth (“vita nova”) to his poetical account of confused devotion to Beatrice in the Vita Nuova itself, we are meant to realize that Dante here is also indicting, by means of the true voice of Beatrice, that earlier work’s false facsimile of devotion, that book’s “false image of good, which paid no promise [it made] in full” in that the way the Vita Nuova’s narrative abruptly breaks off in a sudden dissatisfaction and frustration—both to the poet-speaker and his readers—results in a failure to deliver on its seeming promise of satisfying meaning and resolution. Rightly declaring in the final chapter of the Vita Nuova that at present his work was “unworthy” of her, he had left befuddled readers with a promise to resume her praises again when the right time should come, hoping to “compose concerning her what has never been written in rhyme of any woman” (99). Thankfully her behavior in the Purgatorio and Paradiso correctively informs both him and his readers about the unseen truth of what the speaker unknowingly declares at the close of the Vita Nuova; and so we are all spared yet another hollow echo of the kind of callowly self-serving poetic praise with which the Vita feeds itself and its readers to repletion. At the conclusion of the Purgatorio instead, in demanding acknowledgment of sin and repentance for the false idolatry of his youth before Dante’s artistic alter ego may be properly baptized in Lethe’s waters of forgetfulness, Beatrice’s stern intercession finally fosters the poet-speaker’s proper passage into paradise through her guidance, where he is to learn that his beatification is not to include ecstatic congress with her at all.

An intimation of this occurs when, after her rebuke and his repentance are completed, she suddenly declares to Dante: “Hold me, hold me” at Purgatorio 31. At that momentary narrative aporia, readers of the Comedy can only be as shocked as the semi-comatose poet to learn that the summons these words make proves in its immediate aftermath no pliant erotic inducement and prelude to a lover’s embrace, as he and his readers have mistakenly been led to imagine might sooner or later materialize. Instead we learn, as does he—having previously been drawn in his dazed mental state into Lethean waters—that her words are but a firm and supportive order to his reawakening consciousness to trust in her power to carry him yet further, over the waters of forgetfulness in which she goes on to submerge him completely and capably, on the way to the far shore where his experience of the life of the truly blessed awaits. Indeed, in the Paradiso she proves not to be the earthly consort with whom he had falsely imagined satisfying transcendent reunion in private, but a Diotima-like mediatrix between his blind humanity and the true illumination of divine vision he is about to experience, embrace, and independently seek instead. Having left him, like Virgil, his previous spiritual guide, when she could not lead him to anything higher, she has weaned him from his false attachment to the rose pudoris, self-serving lure of passionate cupidity, however seemingly high minded, to direct his attention to the sempiternal rose of true appreciation and yearning for the divine order and plenitude of an endlessly blossoming creation.13

Throughout the Vita Nuova, Dante’s surrogate, man in name only—more peeping Tom and timid stalker than lover—ever remains “unable to endure [Beatrice’s] presence” (53); yet her utter absence from his life, whether in vivo or in morte, whether she smiles or frowns at him, only makes his heart grow “fonder”—at once more enamored and more obsessed with the fantasy of her he creates and idolizes. Never doing anything to speak of, he does nothing but maunder about his love—the “van imaginazione” (70) courted in vain precisely because it is also narcissistically self-regarding in intent. In all his pained yammerings he never actually speaks to the woman herself nor ever directs that any of his declarations of devotion somehow be communicated to her, even indirectly. As pathetic imitations of and parodic allusions to the wise analytic commentaries of Boethius’ Consolation and the valuable scholastic divisioni glossing difficult Aristotelian texts, even the speaker’s prose commentaries, alternating with the lyrics in the narrative, are not elucidations of the depths of his devotion, but, rather, by all accounts of readers from that day to this, tediously repetitive and self-evident echoes of the poet-speaker’s self-obsessed reflections in the poems.14

It is not so much Beatrice’s death, as the speaker declares, that leaves the city of Florence “widowed” (81) as it is his entire life that does so. Throughout the Vita Nuova “nothing remained alive in me except a thought which spoke of my lady” (52). The city the poet-speaker should call home is not truly Florence in all its teeming variety and need, it is a “shadowy impalpable world” (Musa 100) whose inhabitants are “also appropriately vague” (102); it is a fantastic u-topos where there is more “vitality, movement and color” (106) in the protagonist’s private visions and dreams than in the city beyond the “private chambers” to which the poet constantly retreats merely to talk to himself and write of the self-professed nobility of his devotion in preference to engaging his neighbors in any meaningful fashion. In one of the only near-encounters with the greater world in the Vita Nuova, when the narrator notices some penitent pilgrims, far from home, passing through the city on their way to Rome to revere the image of their crucified God in Veronica’s veil, his only thought is not to relieve the actual hardships they are enduring or to substitute his hospitality for the absent loved ones of whom they are presently deprived; it is instead a blasphemous one: how long it would take him to “convert” them from their orthodox religious devotions to his own impenitent worship of the veiled image of his goddess; how long before he could make them weep—not for their sins, but for his grief over his imaginary loss.

I say “imaginary” because the love he always enjoys in near and n’er enjoying the object of his attentions is not something that can ever be withdrawn by Beatrice herself, alive or dead, approving or disapproving. It is not, as he believes, only when Beatrice has denied “me her greeting” that the god of love he worships has “in his mercy . . . placed all my hope of that same joy in something which cannot fail me . . . words which praise my lady” (54)—words (in a revealing ambiguity) “whose praise is my embellishment” (57). From the first words he has uttered, it has ever been so. His songs of praise for his lady never miss a single pleasurable beat even when she shifts from approval to disapproval of him because his praises of her have never been ones that ever failed to embellish his own exalted image of himself in singing them.

Comparing great things with small, on three separate occasions (once, ludicrously enough, before Beatrice has in fact died or even withdrawn her seeming approval of him) Dante’s namesake alludes to the first words of The Lamentations of Jeremiah (i, 1–2 and 12) to measure his own and his city’s pain of desolation by that of the prophet before a fallen Jerusalem. The allusion is, however, far more significant for the contrasts between the speaker’s pain and Jeremiah’s it elides than for the trivial grounds of likeness it establishes. Though the sad pain each feels is equally real enough, Dante’s callow surrogate suffers for a wholly fictive sense of loss he feels, whereas Jeremiah suffers for the very real and monumental desolation of an entire city’s populace, an eventuality he had foreseen and tried to warn against at enormous cost in self-sacrifice to himself for doing so. Yet the grief and sorrow he now feels is not, like the Dantean narrator’s, self-pity. Though Jeremiah might be forgiven the grim momentary satisfaction of an “I-told-you-so” vindication here (were he to take it), the grief he expresses for his fellows is a pained triumph of self-transcendence. His grief is unlike and greater than that of anyone else in the now desolate city. No idle and vain sorrow, in it, he grieves, unlike the citizenry, not only for himself but for them as well, even now, in his continuing love for them. He had warned the people of Jerusalem repeatedly to turn from their worship of idols to the true God; the Dantean narrator, by contrast, continues to fashion and bow down unrepentantly before the insubstantial image he has fabricated and continues to worship.

At the very outset of his inconsequential narrative, the speaker had retold a “marvelous vision” (31) he had in a dream.

In my room I seemed to see a cloud of fire and in the cloud a lordly figure frightening to behold, yet in himself, it seemed to me, he was filled with a marvelous joy. . . . In his arms I seemed to see a naked figure, sleeping, wrapped lightly in a crimson cloth. Gazing intently I saw it was she who had bestowed her greeting on me earlier that day. In one hand the standing figure held a fiery object, and he seemed to say, Vide cor tuum. After a little while I thought he wakened her who slept and prevailed on her to eat the glowing object in his hand. Reluctantly and hesitantly she did so. A few moments later his happiness turned to bitter grief and weeping he gathered the figure in his arms and together they seemed to ascend into the heavens.

This dream vision should not represent the source of mystification it proved to the Dantean narrator himself or the source of contestation it has since become to the Vita Nuova’s readers. It should be seen as a premonitory emblem of the various stages and ultimate absence of progress in the wasted movements of the entire narrative. True to its narcissistic origins, all the characters in the dream are but aspects of the dreamer himself. The “lordly figure” bearing Beatrice to his personal embrace; the fiery heart of the suffering lover, eating its heart out as it burns in unrequited desire; and even the Beatrice whom he vainly construes as a figure upon whom to reluctantly project blame for his ruinous state: all, symbolically speaking, but aspects of the poet-speaker himself, as is the “lordly figure” (if in his own eyes alone) whose happiness in the lovers’ communion abruptly turns to bitter grief (presumably at her remonstration of him or at her death) and the same lordly figure who subsequently seems to ascend to his eternal reward with his prize at and after Beatrice’s departure from this world. The “lordly figure” is not, as the speaker seems to imagine, a true divinity at all but the sublimated cupidity that precipitates his life of trial. The speaker eats his own heart out in his desire for a perfection that is not cultivated within through hard labor and pangs of new birth. It is, instead, a self-gratifying glory begged at no expense to self, from another. The “lordly figure” we ever see in possession of Beatrice throughout the dream illusion that is the Vita Nuova, symbolically, is no god at all but a comically vain creature who is “frightening to behold, yet in himself . . . filled with a marvelous joy” at and within himself alone.

In the Canzoniere, Petrarch’s surrogate presence, Petr-arca (in other words, the “stony casket”), imagines that the surrogate presence he worships is wholly other than himself, this despite the intimate linkage and near identity between his Laura and his own poetic lauro. What’s more, this poet-speaker, the sequence’s narcissistic eye/I, is, if anything, even more monomaniacally abstracted from life, even more phantasmagorical in his wholly self-preoccupied devotions to the woman he idolizes, than was the poet-speaker in the Vita. In the absence of any manifestation of his beloved that is not filtered through his fantasies, the woman he adores cannot be other than his own image of her presented to us as her reality, a most curious objectification of her person that as often as not identifies her by her scattered body parts or conjures her ghostly presence by homonymic equivalences. As he himself declares in 135, “The strongest and most wondrous” oddity “ever seen in any foreign land, if judged correctly, is what I am like.” What are we to make of a figure who, truth be told, is never “all there” at any given moment of the sequence, a pitiably unhinged and solitary wanderer whom we overhear endlessly and alternately murmuring and raving to himself as much as to anyone else we can see regarding his obsession with a seemingly pitiless, ever-absent beloved who has driven the thought of everything else from his besotted consciousness, leaving him to sing his songs of lost love, a man nearly as deranged in his “mad desire” (folle desio) as the mad Ophelia? Giving no sign of any awareness or self-consciousness about the pathetic figure he cuts before us, he is reduced—by his own admission—to recording little else in his environment but those things whose names so resemble the sound of his beloved’s name that in mouthing them he can keep her image before his mind’s eye (and a distracted “I”) and thus further feed the deviant fixation he readily concedes is slowly destroying him, driving his frail bark onto rocky shoals, turning his being to stone.

It is curious why critical reaction to this bizarre bipolar mania throughout the sequence has not more often resembled the sobering assessment the poet himself in the Secretum places in the mouth of his spiritual mentor, Augustine:

Who could sufficiently utter his indignation and amazement at this sign of a distempered mind, that infatuated as much by the beauty of her name as by her person you have with perfectly incredible silliness paid honour to anything that has the remotest connection with that name itself. (134)

Indeed, Petr-arca’s onomastic obsession might more appropriately call to mind the self-emblazoning graffiti of adolescent infatuates who deface bridges and buildings to proclaim their romantic mantras, carve tree trunks with their own names to immortalize infatuations, or fill their civics textbooks with hundreds of orthographically varied renditions of their neo-pubescent nonpareil’s name than it could ever reasonably suggest or confirm a legitimate basis for profound admiration of Petr-arca’s chosen way of life or poetical fixations. Only the honorific status accorded to anything that might appear under the great Italian humanist’s seeming signature (and to a lesser degree, no doubt, our unfortunate human tendency to identify with the poet-speaker’s romantic delusion) can explain how the sequence should have come down to us read to unironical applause as “the work of an eternal pilgrim . . . the consummate work of an unconsummated desire” (Freinkel 49).

Petr-arca’s paradoxical narrative is, truly enough, as Freinkel suggests, a work whose undeviating focus is one man’s “indefatigable weariness” (93), a man who, for more than the three decades the sequence tediously records, reluctantly drives himself forward on his life’s way, at each and every step turning backward to look over his shoulder in yearning for the fateful ecstasy of his youthful inamoramento. Thus this Orpheus endlessly recapitulates the loss of his dead Eurydice. Ever simultaneously pushing himself on to feel himself pulled back, his spirit both spurred and reined in at once by his memories, he stands forever fixed in the same psychic aporia as he proceeds on his way, desperately hoping to hold on to and preserve that with which he knows he has already lost touch. Even early in the series, the narrator can say, “I am already weary of thinking how my thoughts of you are weariless” (74:1–2), while “I turn back at each step with my weary body which with great effort I carry forward” (15:1–2). What remains gravely underreported, however, is that if his unfailing loyalty to Laura produces nothing but an indefatigable weariness in him, only a comparably indefatigable weariness can carry a reader from one end of this endless Echo/echo chamber to the other without shutting the book in frustration or disgust at its seemingly interminable tedium. One is reminded that Capaneo had defined hell to Dante as the condition of eternal stasis and repetition. The temptation is to repeat the insult Onesto da Bologna leveled at the poet Cino: “Truly, all human burdens seem sweet in comparison with what you cause a man to endure who reads you” (Valency 218).

It is Petrarch himself who most urges us to skepticism of the view that would lionize the spirit of Petr-arca taking bittersweet delight in self-important devotions. In the very first poem of the sequence, even before we have heard a word of his amorous servitude, Petrarch presents his readers with an apparent palinode. Seemingly putting the cart before the horse, the author apprises us that in important ways he is no longer the same man at all who composed these poems of futile devotion we are about to read. Indeed, he frankly declares of them all that they were the product of mio primo giovenile errore, juvenile days whose “vanities” (12) produced nothing but “shame’s fruit, / and my repentance” (12–13)—a spiritually regenerated state wholly absent from the speaker’s consciousness in the sequence proper except, incipiently, in the series’ concluding lyric when his lifelong devotion to Laura/lauro suddenly yields completely to a heartfelt prayer of devotion to the Virgin, a prayer for the first and only time in the sequence actually addressed to the woman it concerns. For 365 lyrics, the poet-speaker bemoans to the thin air the absence of any responsiveness from Laura, his dea abscondita who “of my thousand sufferings knew not one” (366:94); now, shifting ground completely and without warning, he suddenly invokes Laura’s antitype as his “true Beatrice” (vera beatrice 53), someone who “always answered whoever called with faith” (7–8). Unexpectedly, he prays, not that the Virgin intercede on his behalf with Laura, the figurative “sun” (first mentioned as such at 4:13) that initially dazzled but then subsequently blinded his undeviating gaze of over thirty years (“Nature . . . gave me eyes which I fixed only on / what did me harm” [355:6–8]) but, instead, that she intercede with her son, that “highest Sun” (366:2), the “Sun of Justice” who illuminates a “world” (44) gone blind in its fixations, that “Fount of pity” (43) who, by contrast to his pitiless “goddess,” is a “true God” (59) bringing salvation into the world for men wearied by “blind ardor” (20) like the one he has conceived for his Laura/lauro, his false image of good, which pays no promise in full.

Like the Virgin herself, he has long treasured and nurtured within himself the gestating image of the divinity he worshipped, and that alone. But unlike the beneficial and sustaining fruit of the Virgin’s womb that “brought into this world” the salvific “Fount of pity” (43) and “grace” (40), the veiled precincts of his inner temple have always been and remain quite desolate and barren, his devotions but vacant shuttles that weave the wind, his ceaseless hymns merely an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, love’s labor lost. Having long since confessed that he had his heart ripped from his body by this love, the barren effect of his gestation of vain hopes (vane speranze, 1:6) and vain sorrows (vane dolore, 1:6) in its stead have “turned me to stone / dripping useless [or vain] moisture” (d’umor vano, 366:112)—the wasted ink that has compounded his wasted and wasting tears of grief. The Virgin’s inner being, by contrast, despite all its sorrows, remains a “living temple” (58) still venerating and nurturing the incarnate body and redemptive spirit of her Son. Now that his own place of worship has been transformed into a hollow shell of its former self, now that Petrarch has become petr-arca, a “stone tomb or casket” from which whatever life and spirit that once existed in him has been effectively turned to “dust” (92), it is to her temple that he now comes, suppliant, in search of a vita nova, the resurrected life that is nowhere to be found in the empty tomb of his own person.

In 135, the same canzone in which he had likened himself to the “strangest and most wondrous / thing ever seen in any foreign land” (1–2), Petr-arca had likened himself specifically to a “very strange bird,” one, significantly, “without a consort” (6) who

voluntarily

dies to be born, renewing all its life.

Just so is my desire

unique, and just so at the summit

of its high thoughts it turns to face the sun [read Laura/lauro]

and so it is consumed

and so it returns to its original state;

it burns and dies and then renews its focus

and goes on living, vying with the phoenix. (7–15)

Unlike the phoenix, emblem of Christ’s resurrected life, this strange bird cycles endlessly through its birth/death/birth in the consuming flames of solitary passion, vying with the phoenix but ending merely as the “scattered ashes” (320:14) of his passion’s incineration in the rime sparse (1:2). In the preface to his Gargantua, Rabelais had warned his readers not to be misled by his narrative’s profane grotesqueries. Likening his text to Alcibiades’ depiction of Socrates in the Symposium as a thoroughly homely exterior that, appearances notwithstanding, veils within itself lovely hidden altars of pious devotion to the gods, so Rabelais argues his seemingly profane book hides virtuous intent and sacred orientation. A satirical humorist himself, Petrarch would have us note that just the reverse is the case with Petr-arca’s Canzoniere. The book’s lovely surface allure as a “holy” (228:14) account of undying devotion actually hides a grotesque and profane interior, the heartlessly hollow desolation of a compulsively destructive, truly strange bird who has no living “consort” at all, no one beyond the vain hellfires in his inner cauldron of self-blinding and self-consuming desire to whom to devote himself.

Nor is the framing material introducing and concluding the sequence the only sign from Petrarch that we are meant to view the obsessive enthusiasm of his alter ego with skepticism. The entire Secretum is a sustained critique of the lover’s stance in the sequence, and when Petrarch himself refers to these lyrics in his letters he does so with disparagement, calling his surrogate self’s devotion an “instabilis furor amantium” (Variae ix). Veiling the truth in false modesty, he describes the poems themselves as his nugellas meas vulgares, “common nonsense” or “worthless trifles.” No critique could be more withering to Petr-arca’s sense of a special destiny for which he was chosen from all others, himself alone to know his goddess’ illumination in a world that otherwise knew it not (338:12–13). In a letter to Christiani that should be fair warning to those only too ready to identify with the poet-speaker’s seemingly high-minded yet purely autogenetic conception of love, Petrarch describes his former state as a burning fever of youth, a “solitude” in which

there was nothing to extinguish my flame. So in my distress the fire in my heart burst forth through my lips; but as some say, it filled the air and valleys with a sweet murmur. Here had their origins those songs in Italian of my youthful woes, which today fill me with shame and regret; but, as we are aware, they are very welcome to those afflicted by the same disease. (Familiari VIII:3)

And in perhaps the most revealing of all his coy hints of underlying import, at Seniles I, 6, Petrarch declares that the writer of the Rime Sparse was

not so much a scholar as a lover of woodlands, solitary, given to murmuring foolishly amid high beeches and, with the utmost presumption, to toying with my little pen beneath a bitter laurel tree.

This bit of naughty wit spurts the seed of Petr-arca’s “scattered” verses (the word sparse or its variants recurs over forty times in the sequence), his nugellas, in a tragi-comically wasteful new direction. This idolatrous kind of love the poet-speaker disseminates (compare the Shake[n]spear’s hapless ejaculations) is the antitype of the pious Platonic eros, the attraction and inclination toward divine being Dante had declared “binds together and unites” all things on earth (Paradiso I, 117)—elements otherwise fragmented and “scattered.” It is but an onanistic dispersal scattered on barren ground, where it can never come to meaningful fruition, leaving the self-gratifying debauchee (whether writer or idly self-gratifying reader) with the will to go on but no power to do so—the exhausted spendthrift nothing but a “stone dripping useless moisture” indeed.

In the lovesick Western imagination, Petrarch and Laura sit enshrined in the pantheon of legendary lovers, carved first on the monumental scale Petr-arca prefers (“a statue that can think and weep and write,” 129:52). They are “l’idolo mio scolpito” (30:27) in simultaneous tribute to his beloved and his presumptuous belief in his utterly extraordinary and incomparable love for her (at 229, with comic immodesty, he boasts that there is “no nobler state than mine beneath the moon” [13]), this despite the mirroring pair’s complete indifference to other human beings and the suffering such indifference generates. How rightful could their place of honor be? How worthy the worship it is meant to inspire? Of what enduring substance is this love made?

For her part, through absolutely no fault of her own that we can determine, Laura’s blasphemous, life-denying image of perfection (this “beauty eternal . . . more precious than what lives,” 268:43–4) is literally fashioned ex nihilo by Petr-arca himself, pretender to the divine power of creation. Surely Petrarch means us to see that the poet-speaker’s autogenetic “image” to which, alone, he clings, “not made by Zeuxis, Praxiteles, or Phidias, / but by a better artist with more talent” (130:9–11), is comically ambiguous. Like Petrarchan mistresses after her, she “is entirely the product of the discourse in which she is placed” (Waller 81). She does not actually do or say anything directly that would allow us to make determinations about her character. She is merely a mad ventriloquist’s dummy, a phantasmal presence in the sequence, for the most part a silent iconic figure of perfection; alternately goddess and Medusa, heavenly light and murderous mirror gazer clutched at in her absence as fetish carved from the female body’s disjecta membra, most often and especially her shining eyes and golden (l’aureo) locks scattered in the breeze (l’aura), both eyes and hair figuratively but the visionary “footprints” of her fleeing foot. No warm and breathing female presence of the here and now, she is a creature of memory who once momentarily manifested herself to him as in a dream and the wish-fulfilling future desire for what the poet-speaker repeatedly admits will never be in the flesh. No incarnate being, she becomes the scattered tally of his “woes to come and joys already past” (Caelica #42), testimony to an art whose sole subject is not her living person but his own “endless memory” (327:14) of his fidelity to his lost love and its commemoration in verse intended to immortalize its creator easily as much as it does the merely “nominal” object of its celebratory recall. His quest for the personal gratification of this literary immortality is as doubly “vain” a pursuit as his ceaseless efforts to retrieve Laura/Eurydice herself. The recognition he hopes for in both pursuits neither can nor ever will materialize while he is alive in the flesh to record or enjoy it. Both pursuits are but wishful thinking idly entertained by a self-torturing soul. In actual fact, by his own admission, he gets no untroubled satisfaction from his verse as long as he lives. When he likens himself to Acteon (23:147–60; see 52), another figure, like him, who saw his goddess in her full resplendence but once, he implicitly confesses that his poetic pursuit of his memories of Laura’s disjecta membra have brought him no relief but, like Acteon’s dogs, have turned on him “in rage” (160) to tear him into nothing but scattered pieces in his turn.

As in the Vita, the focus and tone of the in vivo and in morte sub-sections of Petrarch’s specular sequence are virtually indistinguishable because the poet’s surrogate, like Dante’s, does not truly mind whether the Laura he worships might be dead or alive. In either case he only “sighs for her absence” (129:64)—not so much “because of” that absence, but in a most odd “yearning for” it—so that, in his megalomania, he may concentrate to mad exclusion on what he believes is his father’s business; not the New Testament’s redemptive love, but the Old Testament’s creation ex nihilo.

No animating love, his is an attenuating dis-ease whose alternate and revolving fever and chills produce nothing but hallucinatory ravings that yet seem to inflame him in their cruel coldness or, alternately, chill him even in the heat of his desire, leaving him “consum’d with that which [he is] nurrisht by” (73:12). In the throes of his continuing near-delirium, the speaker yet hallucinates his own happiness, mystifyingly cultivating only the joy of near/n’er enjoying. Though he is ever ready to acknowledge the futility of his plight, chasing a summer breeze (a “l’aura estiva” 212:2) swimming “a sea that knows no depth or shore” (3) to “plow waves and build on sand and write in wind” (4), perpetually gazing at a sun that blinds him (5–6), nevertheless he simultaneously remains “Blest in my dreams and satisfied,” a reincarnated Narcissus, “to languish [and] embrace shadows” (1–2). Having pursued in futility a phantom he wills into reality for over thirty years (figured as a mythical white doe, with two gold horns and a “No one touch me” sign in diamonds and topaz about her [in other words, his] neck), true alone to his infamous forebear he “fell in the water and she vanished” (190:14). All Petr-arca’s bittersweet devotions are nothing more than a wailing Echo/echo of the smiling yearning of Narcissus. The Siren song that lures his little bark too near the unfeeling rocks that spell his ruin as the “petr-arca” he has become is not, in fact, anything she sings, but his own autoerotically alluring lyrics—indeed, he himself declares at one point, his destroyer is “less the thing outside than in the bark” (80:12) itself, a spirit within himself that remains locked away in the ruinous viva petra (50:78) of his own unresponsive heart. He is himself the strong idol-maker and the idol “that compassion wants” in both senses of that last word.

In the Christian poesis Petrarch reverses here to satiric effect, the word was made flesh and dwelt among us; in the poet-speaker’s topsy-turvy poesis the flesh may simply be made word and dwell alone in the poet-speaker. In his blasphemous new worship, Laura, his blinding sun, and, thus, the antitype of the lumen Christi, has come as a light to the world, but “that world did not know her [see John 1:19] while she was here.” “I” alone “knew her” (338:12–13) he boasts while, “full of” nothing more substantial than “a loving thought,” he “stray(s) from all the rest and goes the world alone” (169:1–2) where “no other thing [can] ever touch my heart.” The Judeo-Christian godhead addressing mankind may be a nameless “I am that I am,” the Yahweh whose identity and essence lie beyond any human comprehension or power to name; this new deity Petr-arca thinks addresses him alone is the “I am not” (23:83), an absence by her own ambiguous self-declaration transformed solely into “who you think[,] I am,” a being whose identity and essence (I am) is nothing more than her devotee’s mistaken conception of her (I am not who you think) endlessly “taking her name in vain” in his very worship. Petr-arca, the rock upon which this new church is built, is even less steady and reliable than St. Peter himself was.

In the calendrical cyclicity of this parodic new liturgy and litany of the word, a 365-lyric Breviari D’Amor, the poet-speaker blithely supplants the man of sorrows self-sacrificially concerned with humankind’s redemption with a new annunciation of himself instead as the new man of sorrows concerned only with his own all-consuming self-pity (compare 359:23, where he declares to his fantasy of Laura “I weep only for myself” with 232:10–11, where he tells her he is “in tears—no, not tears for you but for my loss”). On the Good Friday that marks his fateful inamoramento (see Sonnet 3), the speaker initiates over thirty years of ceaseless wailing, not for Christ’s salvific wounds, but for his own single “wound that never will be cured” (97:4; see 195). On that idolatrous Good Friday, in fifteen anniversary lyrics scattered throughout the sequence, and in countless references back to this most sacred of holy days in the Christian calendar besides the Resurrection day itself, the poet nowhere celebrates the Son of Man’s redemptive sacrifice. In the “season which from year to year / renews,” not life itself, but “my ancient wounds on that same day” (100:10–11), he commemorates his own self-perpetuated and private crucifixion without benefit of redemption or resurrected life for him or anyone else since “springtime for me will never come about” (9:14) in all his years and verses’ turnings. Thus, in displacing the redeemer by turning to self-preoccupation and lack of concern for others, he unknowingly confesses that his unremitting concentration on his own trivial “misfortunes began in midst of universal woe” ignored (3:7–8). In this, he wrongly imagines himself uniquely aggrieved and somehow excluded from the fallen condition of man. Though equally idolatrous, he does not consider himself like other men, alienated from the true God of plenitude upon whom both they and he have turned their backs to trust in the strength of their own sterile devices and desires.

Sonnet 4 explicitly reenacts the myth of the Christian incarnation, only at the very last moment to reverse conventional expectations when the “bella donna” that the speaker declares brought godhead “into the world” does not allude to the Virgin, but to Laura; nor is the “godhead” the incarnate Christ but, heretically, the bella donna herself. But, as Sonnet 6 immediately clarifies, this bella donna is a poisonous ingestion; the dying Laura/laurel that Petr-arca himself plants in the middle of his heart (see 228 and 255), and cultivates with his pen and waters with his tears, idolatrously “adoring it as something that is holy” (228:14), a “bitter fruit” that “once tasted”—by contrast to redeeming love—“afflicts rather than comforts someone else’s wounds” (6:13–14). It yields only death and “shame” (1:11), the twin curses that result from eating of the forbidden tree.

Though Freccero mistakenly concludes that the Canzoniere does not share the “moral dimension of meaning” (34) so central to Augustine’s Confessions, he does note that Petrarch’s lyric sequence is modeled on the poet’s favorite book. Petrarch’s comic parody of the Confessions is, as the first song of the sequence pointedly emphasizes, also an attempt to “recapture a former self in a retrospective literary structure” (34). But the image Petrarch describes in this literary mirror is both inverted and comically distorted. As an imitation differentielle, the satirical humor of its structural thematics depends upon the recognition of its inverted parallelism to the earlier work’s design. Both accounts pivot on a conversion experience, but Augustine’s book expends the better part of its energy and text slowly building to the crowning moment in Book 8 when, under a fig tree (biblical emblem of fulfilled promise), Augustine heeds the childlike voice calling him from without to “take up and read” (tolle, lege, 8.12) the New Testament. This precipitates his great transformation from the sinful vetus homo to the Christian faith’s vita nova, Paul’s “new” man from old Adam. Though equally life-changing, the conversion in the Canzoniere does not, however, build slowly to its climax; it strikes the Petrarchan autobiographer immediately and with the same blinding impact as did Paul’s on the road to Damascus. His transformation, however—more regression or reversion than conversion, truth be told—unlike Paul and Augustine’s, does not foretell a saintly shift from pagan worldliness and libidinous gratification to spiritual integrity: from old Adam to new man, but just the reverse. What’s more, his blindness, unlike Paul’s, will not be temporary, as the speaker turns, without so much as a single backward glance thereafter at the Christian sacrifice and redemption of Good Friday, to embrace instead, from that moment on, his old Adam’s passionate prostration before a pagan icon executed in his new Eve’s female form.

From the vantage point of Augustine’s new-found integrity, and solely that others might be led to adopt a richer way of life from his example, the self-mortifying saint voluntarily chooses to expose to readers his former shamefulness, retracing his “wicked ways” in order to dramatize how he “collected himself out of that dispersion in which I was shattered into pieces” (2.1), to be made whole again through god’s grace, now directed toward the divine good. In this manner, the Confessions constitutes a metapoetic effort to become a salvific “testament” in its own right, a voice urging its readers: tolle, lege. This is decidedly not the case in Petr-arca’s “confession,” however. Describing no re-orienting, re-deeming ascent, but only a perpetual backsliding, driven from the Judeo-Christian promised land back into diaspora, he repeatedly confesses that he is more than content to remain in his scattered condition. “Until the final day closes [his] eyes” (30:18), he knows he will endlessly circle upon himself in futility as he does nothing but mark time pursuing the “shadow” (16) cast by his sun, Laura, through the lyric branches of “lovely laurel” (dolce lauro 16) around which he ever orients his life because in its shadows she still manifests herself in fragmentary ways. No fig tree or blossoming cross—symbols of fulfilled promise—his art, his lauro, is the tree of the fall, a false image of good that pays no promise in full, the tree under whose fruitless yet enduring green of illusory hopes in passion and fame he sits, urged by no voice but his own, to take up his pen and pour out his scattered verses. And so, with no purpose of life’s amendment, he spurts page upon page of his echoing laments and yearnings until the tears that water his laurel run dry.

Without exemplary purpose of amelioration in or benefit to his audience, he sings for self-consoling purposes only, hoping to arouse “some pity in the eyes of someone born here in a thousand years” (30:34–5). What little effect he cares to produce beyond that in his readers is solely that his description of his Laura have sufficient verisimilitude that it “inflame” others as it had inflamed him so that they might themselves properly feel wonder at the torture he has endured—not so that their lives might be bettered. He does not see that the “endless memory” (327:14) he tends so carefully in an effort to immortalize it is only nominally in Laura’s service. The thing he would immortalize is admiration for the “endless memory” in his own devotion—the “sweet honor you gain loving her” (205:7). Fools may be inflamed by what inflamed him, but just as surely “noble minds” (327:13) will not: his songs solely a commemorative dirge sung over what is already lifeless echoing hollowly in a stony casket or tomb void of engaged life.

Unlike Augustine, who recaptures his past to progress to a more meaningful future under the aegis of the fig tree’s “sure hope of correction and pardon” Petr-arca unwittingly confesses only to himself being unrepentantly recaptured again and again by an ever more remote past he knows he cannot truly recapture and a future of more of the same, ever wearily treading in place as he continues to lose ground on his confused way, proceeding in circles, lost. No matter how unswerving its pursuit, he cannot—any more than Apollo can—redeem a willfully unworthy and petrifying love that dehumanizes with the laurel’s poetic praise of it. His indefatigable weariness in pursuit of his desire is not Augustine’s developmental advance but an infinite regression, nothing but an endless petr-ification of the beloved. The broken record of his song’s self-satisfied devotion transforms him into Orpheus redivivus, a singer who looks back again and again for his lost Eurydice, each time to discover her receding further from him into the darkness of hell’s eternal separation from which he longs to escape with her. But, as he himself admits at 118: “I am still what I have always been, / not through a thousand turnings [of glance or verse] have I moved” (118:13–14). Petr-arca’s “tears,” like Astrophil’s, only “refresh the hell where my soule fries” (A&S 100:8). Lust remains nothing more than lust, whether pursued straightforwardly as the pleasures of the bestial or surreptitiously masked as high-soundingly sublimated cupidity. One way or the other, Petrarch informs us:

Those who pursue their lusts do not attain this goal [satisfied well-being in the present], for just as a useless or broken container is never full, so those who always begin afresh never reach an end, there being no end to something infinite; what is more, cupidity is ever vigorous and incipient, always attractive and infinite. Those, then, who follow her are undertaking an infinite journey, never resting nor able to find repose because their motivation, lust, knows no rest. (Familiari 21.12)

Petr-arca does not realize with what self-referential force he speaks when he declares: “[the being] who destroys me is always in my mind to my sweet pain” (164:5–6), there to be “born and die a thousand times a day” (13) within, “so far away . . . from my salvation” (14). The love that drives him on and holds him back at the same time (Amor mi sprona in un tempo et affrena, 178:1), the desire that is at once “spur and rein” to himself (161:10)—takes him nowhere despite his poetic exertions’ foaming at the mouth (not to mention any other orifices); “it merely rides me to death” (6:11). Even after Laura’s demise, in poem after poem, he continues to beat the dead horse that is his own being and verse. With the continuing self-preoccupation of Narcissus he grinds away at what’s left of a mushy quill. From the beginning there has ever been in his love, as Petr-arca himself oddly declares, a strange “living man / [hid] beneath [Laura’s] simple dress or little veil” (182:7–8), furtively taking his shamelessly laughable consolations.

When his pursuit of Daphne (read Laura) is appropriately frustrated by her petrified transformation into a tree, Apollo (read Petr-arca) consoles himself for the loss of the erotic prey that has eluded him by appropriating the laurel that she has come to be as “his” tree, now that she will never be “his” bride. His designation of the evergreen but fruitless laurel as at once symbol of proud conquest and poetic preeminence, the laurel tree can do nothing to redeem the irreparable damage unworthy desire has done to transform a potentially fruitful young woman into a thing woefully less than human. The pursuer’s balked longing only “takes advantage of” her petrified body in a pathetic new way now to feed his unapologetically self-consoling purposes. Petr-arca’s poetic appropriation and celebration of his own lost love is, like the god’s, an equally lame, superficially self-gratifying consolation prize rather than the proper contrition and restitution it should have been for his crimes against womanhood and his better self.

The poet-speaker of the Canzoniere worships what Petrarch himself identified as the twin “idols of youth”: Laura and lauro, the Secretum’s amor et gloria, sublimated cupidity and poetic immortality sought in recording it for posterity. For this poet turned “stone, dripping useless moisture” in his inky tears, this mooncalf who cultivates a fruitless lauro within where alone a warm and nurturing heart should be, pursuit of his ends results only in the petri-faction of his own fleeing Daphne and, in a telling elaboration of Ovid’s myth, in his own petri-fication and petri-faction as well (see 129, 213, 243 and 286). For Petrarch, the erotically unbridled pursuit of something less than human must, in the very process, transform the pursuer into something less than human in turn. In canzone 278, the “l’aura mia vita” (4) that fled from Petr-arca forever is not solely the poet-speaker’s once-dying and now three-years’-dead mistress, but as well, he admits, his own “vital spirit” or breath of life lost in his unyielding commitment to what Sidney was to call the “blind man’s mark . . . fond fancy’s scum” (Certain Sonnets 31:1), leaving Petr-arca but a living “corpse” (278:13) awaiting his heavenly summons without the slightest fear of judgment (see 278:7–11).

Even he knows subliminally that the one thing to which he dedicates his life, the “endless memory” of one perfect and seemingly timeless moment, the epiphanic vision of his beatified Laura preserved by his own poetic tribute from the ravages of time and change, simultaneously exists in an irremediably entropic temporal milieu he likewise obsessively discloses in the sequence. The first sight of his mistress he unfailingly keeps before his failing sight recedes ever further into an irrecoverable past. The more unblinkingly he stares alone at the eternal brightness of his “sun,” the darker and more faint his vision grows. A world in which the speaker’s tribute to his lost Laura is nothing but the “endless memory” his poetic lauro commemorates is likewise a world in which every hour (l’ora) and present moment (ore) are also simultaneously and irrecoverably lost, passing hours merely tolled again and again in every verse he pens. In an irony the Bard will plumb more definitively, an art whose sole purpose is to foil time’s wasting power could not be a more complete waste of time. In a sonnet he did not finally include in the collection, but one that utilizes the l’ora/Laura pun, Petrarch himself warns: “cosi, perdendo il tempo, aspetto l’ora [and Laura/lauro as well],” “Thus losing time I await the hour” (Sonnet 93). Petr-arca’s desperate attempt to recapture and render his absent beloved’s presence results, paradoxically, in his “abstracted” loss of all presence of mind and heart in any and every given moment he enjoys in self-absorbed dissipation. Every blessed hour in which he lingers to worship the iconic image of his beloved (that ora beatrice that enchanted him 191:7) squanders every blessed—and living—hour entrusted to his care, hours that, stewarded well, could give him something to show for his troubles.

A voice crying in the wilderness, Giordano Bruno correctly identified the literary mode of the Canzoniere as mock-encomium in the manner of Lucian and Apuleius:

and those who have in our time sung the praises of urinals . . . of famine, and of the plague, things which perhaps give the appearance of being no less lofty and proud by reason of the celebrated voices of those who sing of them than these and other ladies I have mentioned are, perhaps by reason of the poets who have celebrated them. (“Preface” to The Heroic Frenzies 65)

The names by which this lyric collection has gone, the Rime sparse or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, might better give way to a collection retitled The Praise of Folly, fashioned by a smiling and weeping Folly himself, blissfully unaware that the being he praises so is no other than himself. The archetype of Petr-arca’s transformation into a stone weeping useless moisture is first, and perhaps foremost, Echo, mirroring image of Narcissus’ frustrated desire, a repetitive voice that does little more than dissipate itself ever more faintly as it bemoans its longing and grief over a love object initially unresponsive and subsequently forbidden to its pursuer by death. (This, and no autobiographical coincidence in Dante and Petrarch’s biographies, explains the recurring appearance of the in vivo and in morte structural subdivisions in the two sequences.) The other archetype of Petr-arca’s peculiar misery is the proud and woeful Niobe, converted to stone in her grief for her lost progeny, a figure who ends as nothing more than tears trickling from a stony face. Like the barren fate of Petr-arca, her destiny is to preside in blind pride over the complete dissipation of her wealth (embodied in her many children), the living treasure that might have multiplied her worth exponentially except that in her self-divinizing vanity she continued to persist to boast that she more rightfully deserved the worship and respect reserved alone for the generative power of the gods. When all is said and done, this, then, is Dante and Petrarch’s parodic assessment of and corrective to the troubadour religion of love they inherited.15

Their satirical nod in tribute to the Roman de la Rose (and the more ancient ancestral wisdom of Plato’s Symposium) represents the legacy the Bard inherits, imitates as the sincerest form of praise, and ultimately transforms into his own miracle of rare device. As every one of the manuscript leaves that never “turn over a new leaf” reminds readers, the Q manuscript’s running head, “Shake-speare’s Sonnets,” reiterates for readers his alazon’s filiation to earlier satirical personifications of onanistic folly in the quirky family tree: the couples in Aristophanes’ narcissistic myth of love and Alcibiades’ frustrated purposes despite his artful confession of love in the Symposium; Amant’s long spiritual snooze and deluded fantasy of union with the Rose, from which he awakes to discover he has only been embracing himself in his overheated erotic dream; the Dante of the Vita Nuova, frustrated in his efforts to appropriate Beatrice—onomastic emblem of female beatification—as his own; Petrarch’s stymied petr-arca; Greville’s “Grieve-ill” (Caelica 83:98), explicitly identified as such just prior to his sequence’s disavowal of the snares of cupidinous desire in favor of authentic spiritual yearning; Daniel’s “Danyell” in his dedicatory preface and Danae in the Complaint of Rosamond, an allusion suggestive of a linkage between Daniel’s fifty sonnets and the fifty Danaids, the progeny of Danae/Daniel, all but the last of whom murder their husbands on their wedding night and for their crimes against their own fertility are condemned to carry water in leaky buckets forever. Thus they are left, like Daniel’s protagonist, to “live cast downe from myrth, / Pensive alone, none but despayre about mee; / My joyes abortive, perisht at their byrthe” (50:9–11); Philip Sidney’s Astrophil, whose Stella, Penelope Rich, proves to be as impregnable to his 108 erotic advances as was Odysseus’ faithful wife, Penelope, to the 108 relentlessly acquisitive suitors besieging her. Indeed, as Fowler (citing Benjamin in Triumphal Forms 175–6) has shown, the 108 sonnets in Sidney’s sequence allude satirically to the 108 stones, each representing what Thomas Browne called “prodigal paramours,” in the ancient Penelope game, all aimed at the conquest of a single target and prize, the Penelope stone—the 109th stone in the crass game of target practice whose absence from Sidney’s sequence argues the poet’s clear intention to show his persona as a futile opportunist whose obsessive desire justly remains frustrated.

It is to membership in this dubious fraternity that Will-I-Am Shake-speare proudly adds his own name in self-nomination, his many poems but his shaken spear’s wasted ejaculations. In the first series, he takes up and proceeds to brandish his quill in a quixotic battle with time and change, at first exhorting his youthful battle companion to defeat time through progeny in what amounts to a vain scheme to shield oneself from one’s own mortality by throwing one’s children at the all-eating enemy’s bayonets. Then the poet-speaker takes matters into his own hands when he takes the addressee’s part in order to claim triumph over oblivious time and change by means of his own boast about the immortalizing power of his verse, a claim repeatedly debunked as prideful delusion by medieval and renaissance artists from Boethius, Dante, and Petrarch to Spenser, Nashe, Burton, and Thomas Browne. In the remainder of the sequence, he battles mutability in human relationships with a flattering pen that would maintain at any cost the relationship he tenuously enjoys with his auditor regardless of how humiliatingly self-abnegational and self-disparaging he may need to prove in order to preserve the threatened stability of this love even though this self-torture cannot completely shake the fear that love may be slipping away from him nevertheless.16 The psychic challenger against which he feels he must endlessly renew battle (and thus the “dominant mood” of these poems and those addressed in the shorter sequence to the dark lady) is “fearful anticipation and troubling suspicion” (Dubrow Undramatic Monologues 67), a Hydra-headed monster that repeatedly regenerates itself even as each poem’s ending momentarily manages a hard-fought and hopeful cry of triumph over the adversary he would vanquish. Whether it is the first sequence’s panegyrical exhortations, boasts, and blandishments, however endearing and mollifying (both to himself and his auditor), or the second sequence’s ever more tortured and vitriolic invective, however dyspeptic and fevered, neither ever manages to quiet the poet-speaker’s spiritual ulcer. Both sequences merely continue to feed it. No amount of groveling exculpation offered to his first love nor angry denunciation and feverish accusation leveled at the second can cure the canker eating at the poet-speaker’s Rose from within until each sequence, suddenly depleted, simply goes limp from weakness. The speaker no longer has the heart even to lift his manly pen’s rattled saber, his shaken spear, in further battle bravado. That pen, like Petr-arca’s, ends up dripping uselessly with the sweat of its inky exertions and the lost blood of his many battle wounds (see 366:112) incurred in a cause that was lost before it was begun.

As his fellow human beings, likewise facing imminent emotional losses and personal oblivion, we can only wonder in dread how this dramatization of Will-I-Am Shake-speare relentlessly beating head and heart against the same impregnable wall of human contingency and emotional vulnerability can represent an edifying spectacle, especially since these most universal and fundamental human fears are presented so intimately in each lyric that we cannot help but identify with him in them. But it must nonetheless be acknowledged that the only thing the poet-speaker’s all-too-human will/Will ever accomplishes in either sequence is to “assert” itself verbally and volitionally against shifting circumstances, never to any positive effect that we can determine other than the momentary self-consolation each poem’s seemingly having the last word provides him. In this, however, each poem, echoing its predecessor and the fate of the Danaids, proves but a leaking vessel to take home to his heart to quench its thirst, all its “joys abortive, perisht at their byrth.” Learning nothing from the suffering he repeatedly undergoes in his Sisyphian torments, his will or desire, at once spur and rein, drives him, like Petr-arca (and, truth be told, the rest of us), nowhere but to depletion and death. Such is the human hunger that feeds on itself; man’s unbridled will, “the plenty” that Ovid’s Narcissus admits, “makes me poor” (inopem me copia faecit). Shake-speare’s willful but ever failing pursuit of his Laura/lauro, figured in the two relationships he would manage to his liking and the poetic art that unconditionally celebrates that effort never generate anything but the loss of l’ora and ore—yet more wasted time.

A Lover’s Complaint

The troubled human will, continuing to drive itself to exhaustion—seemingly unable and certainly unwilling to rein itself in in its headlong pursuit of its frustrated purposes—has, needless to say, a timeless lineage. Though old Adam himself is father of Will-I-Am’s line, his more immediate ancestor is Petrarch’s l’ostinata voglia (360:42), the “obstinate will” that feeds Petr-arca’s “blind ardor” (366:20), his “insane desire” (6:1). He is close kin to Sidney’s “web of will whose end is never wrought,” a “self-chosen snare [fashioned from] Desire, desire I have too dearly bought” (Certain Sonnets 31:1, 4–5). More to the present point, he is cousin to the treasonous “craft of will” (126) to which the female narrator of A Lover’s Complaint has already once fallen prey and would again—she readily concedes (321–22)—despite the misery she presently vocalizes. It is the deceitful “craft of will” that does

in the general bosom reign

Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted,

To dwell with him in thoughts, or to remain

In personal duty, following where he haunted

Consents bewitched, ere he desire. (126–31)

She intends these verses in dramatic context solely as a prejudicial characterization of the deceitful power and allure of her seducer; but the ambiguity resulting from the passage’s oddly abstract diction allows it to be understood even more readily as a declaration of a broader Shakespearean analysis of the power and threat of the unbridled will’s deceits in us all—and thus, though occluded, in the unnamed speaker herself. Hence the ironic ambiguity of the poem’s title. The lover’s complaint that has seduced and would again seduce her to her will’s abandonment is not solely her bedmate’s seduction plea. The “naked and concealed fiend” (317) she locates solely in her tempter has already taken up his subtle and cocksure residence within her own soul well before she falls for the seemingly transparent blandishments of the repellent lothario who beds her. That fiend discloses its presence in the hidden guile of the account of her own seduction we hear her fashion in a self-righteous complaint of her own that seduces her (and could conceivably seduce her auditors) into falsely imagining that she has been and remains an innocent victim in all this and not Sidney’s “foole” caught in a “self-chosen snare” of her own deceitful will’s devising. Like her hair’s loose bondage to her bonnet from which she might easily free it (arranged as it is only by a “careless hand of pride” [30]), her amorous enslavement to her lover would mask the weakness of her own mind-forged manacles: for she, “true to bondage, would not break from thence, / Though slackly braided” to that which holds her captive only “in [the] loose negligence” (34–5) seducing her. Her account of her completely “undistinguished woes” (20) is no more trustworthy than other Renaissance female complaints (see Kerrigan Motives of Woe 111), most notably perhaps, those of Verulam in Spenser’s Ruins of Time to which A Lover’s Complaint bears more than a passing resemblance in its setting and initial description of its protagonist and Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond, the first female love complaint to be appended to a sonnet sequence. As unsuspecting auditors imposed upon by her melodramatic sob story, we need to be alert to the possibility that the naked and concealed fiend in it could deceive us as well, because just as Drayton worried aloud about Churchyard and Daniel’s heroines, this one, too, could easily “seduce an unguarded reader.”

Our damsel in distress has little or no excuse for succumbing so readily to her rake’s reputed spell and no sensible claim to the sympathy she thinks she should evoke. In the first place, she cannot plead ignorance; even she admits that the rake’s tawdry reputation preceded him. She kept her distance from him initially because she

knew the patterns of his foul beguiling,

Heard where his plants in others’ orchards grew,

Saw how deceits were gilded in his smiling,

Knew vows were ever brokers to defiling,

Thought characters and words merely but art,

And bastards of his foul adulterate heart. (170–75)

Thus when he subsequently delivers the 103 line complaint that greases the skids so readily for him, it turns out to be a predictably shabby spectacle, full of red flags that would have warned off far more gullible prey. His “line” would strike virtually anyone as the speech of a heartless and thoroughly self-satisfied cad, offering untroubled rationalizations for execrable behavior. His first “romantic” sally against his new mark, for example, is a claim that all his previous engagements with women had been simply “errors of the blood” (184), nothing more than animal passion; until now, when, he claims, his heart has suddenly been completely vanquished, his cold and indifferent heart has never been in any of these ruttings. “Love made them not” (185) he “innocently” protests; in no way, he confesses (expecting absolution) was he ever emotionally touched or even charmed by any of them (190–96). When he protests, “Harm have I done to them, but n’er was harmed” (194), it is no confession of remorse, but, surprisingly, something of a boast. It is as if he would convince his latest dupe that he could be her prince charming, since, like fresh fruit at the “feasts of love” (181), he has no bruises on him. He has nothing to feel ashamed of, he believes, because he presumes (Can he speak for his partners with such certainty?) in human relationships as he knows them “neither party is [nor could be] true nor kind” (185). Whatever shame his bed-partners may have come to know is no skin off his nose (nor sign of their greater humanity than his) since, despite his initiating role, it is something he feels they foolishly “went looking for” (“They sought their shame that so their shame did find” [186]). The more they might reproach him for any callousness on his part toward them, the less he feels urged to feel any shame for it (188). Apparently, for him, ideal sexual relations between men and women should be conducted in perfect indifference to one another’s feelings and moral judgments of any kind.

Hearing silver-tongued blandishments as smooth as these, what “heart,” the female narrator laments, “could scape the hail of his all-hurting aim, / Showing fair nature is both kind and tame” (309–11)? Any woman in her right mind would have shown this vain lothario her back by now. It is hard to imagine how anyone could miss the loutish impression he makes in claiming that the previous women in his life literally “meant nothing to me.” Only an ego as cold and callous, an ego as vain as his own, could mistake the warning signs here for nothing but winning compliment and a true confession of his sudden enslavement by an erotic female force of nature much greater than his own prodigious animal magnetism.

This is made even clearer in the second portion of his wooing, where the only argument he musters to win her is an effort to pander to her vain belief in the superiority of her own erotic allure to his. He rightly assumes she will fall for the self-enthroning notion that only she has sufficient charms to tame him. He succeeds with ease in convincing his mark that the only appropriate tribute to the power she presently enjoys, now that she has captured his “wounded fancy,” would be to gather all the spoils of his previous conquests (“tributes” [197], “talents” [204], “trophies” [218], and “devices” [232]) and offer them to her in defeated tribute to an even greater conqueror. His curiously mannerist fixation on talk of contestation and prizes of war hardly seems an appropriate way in which to express a heartfelt confession of love, just as collecting into a single parcel tokens he had declared completely meaningless in order to offer a proper symbol of tribute to her triumph over him is clearly a comical testimonial to his love’s worthlessness. She reports to us nothing about his person or his personality that she finds winning or admirable, nor could she. What seduces her is alone her own vanity, the one thing the rake knows enough to feed.17 If a nun renounced her “marriage” to Christ because she found this Adonis’ allure irresistible, what divine power must the narrator wield and enjoy if he who could be touched by nothing human cannot in turn resist her enslaving charms? Whatever we may make of the accuracy of his previous claims about his couplings, the truth about this one is surely that “neither party” is “true nor kind” (186), except in the ironic sense that the parties are two of a kind in remaining true only to themselves in their heartlessness.

The female narrator has been ensnared in her own craft of will, the “web of will whose end is never wrought.” Why should we be moved to sympathy for this woman “shrieking undistinguished woe” (20), “rapt auditor of herself, recoiling into solipsism” (Kerrigan Motives of Woe 1), a woman “less theatrical than self-absorbed” who in her frustrated rage tears at the pathetic missives sent by other seduced and abandoned women, communiqués never meant for her eyes in the first place nor now treated by her with any respect or fellow feeling for their shared desolation? Instead, she scatters these Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, shredded to pieces, into the river, her attention wholly focused, like a bird attacking its own mirrored image, on her rage at the being she imagines abused her.

A Lover’s Complaint holds its place beside Shake-speare’s sonnets as Echo-ing aftersong to the sonnets’ account of a frustrated narcissistic will (its woeful complaint “reworded [from off the “concave womb” of a nearby hill] / A plaintful story from a sist’ring vale” [1–2]). Its failure to close the narrative frame it sets up, involving the intercession of a “reverend man” (57) to hear her unrepentant confession, is no sign of artistic inattention but a thematic signal that the female narrator’s cry “cannot make an end of its ending in woe and desire.” No confession, but, like her seducer’s false declarations of love, merely an “unapproved witness” (33) against the man she insists has betrayed her, it is a plea by the naked and concealed fiend within her for unconditional absolution from any responsibility for her plight—from herself if not from anyone else who might overhear her. Since she never interrupts herself long enough to seek her interlocutor’s counsel, it is clear that she is not interested in anyone else’s moral assessment of her situation, but only in hearing herself moan. Any sympathy she might arouse would only be a bonus. In any case, the unbridled human will is not likely to forestall itself in shame and compunction simply because of someone else’s judgment of it, even if it were to be forwarded.

The mingled tones of desolation and intense but hapless yearning left ringing down the ages by her concluding cry of unsatisfied desire means that she cannot manufacture a satisfying conclusion to her corrupted relationship by a sheer act of personal will any more than the speaker of either sonnet sub-sequence can. All of their efforts to do so are what Sidney’s Defence identifies as “erected wit” servicing “infected will.” The deceitful “craft of will” she shares more intimately with her seducer than she does her body is matched in the first sub-sequence by the false good will the speaker shares with the interlocutor in his vain exhortations, boasts, and blandishments, and in the second by the fault-finding ill will that Duncan-Jones has identified as an “outrageous misogyny” (50) that “can now be seen to encompass not so much a passionate devotion to a distantly cruel mistress as elaborate mockery of a woman who is no more than a sexual convenience” (51).

Though the first sequence focuses on sublimated affection for a young man and the second, degrading desire for a woman colored ill, the shared feature that makes of these seemingly disparate aggregations of lyric sentiment a coincidentia oppositorum is the barrenness they have in common. Despite his lusty provocations in the twenty-eight sonnets of the heterosexual cycle (the menstrual number), the persona fails to propagate or conceive a vita nova by which to redeem his being. In the longer homosocial series, one ending in the ominous double climacteric number, the older protagonist’s attempts to cultivate a sublimated erotic intimacy with a fair young man prove no less self-important and inconsequential than the homosocial bonds the older generation of Athenian patricians in the Symposium boast in their relationships with their fair young boys, relationships that Socrates exposes as a complete failure to understand what love actually demands.

In the first sequence’s unwitting prostitution of love, sublimated cupidity’s “still soliciting eye [and ‘I’]” (KL 1.1.231) seeks the satisfaction of a “spiritual” identification with the young man on terms the poet-speaker stipulates without fear that body and heart can be bruised to pleasure soul—his own, the young man’s, and the young women’s to whom he dismissively puts the young man out to stud (see, for example, 6:20 and 40–42). At the second sequence’s opposite extreme, in its false oaths of devotion, the poet-speaker’s “perjurde eye [and ‘I’]” (152:13) seeks purely physical gratifications without regard for the spiritual well-being of his own or his mistress’ soul. In both sequences, “want of love tormenteth” (V&A 202), not alone because the persona of both sequences must endure the frustration of aroused desire repeatedly balked, but also because, in a more important sense, his willful desires “want” or “lack” true good will, a caritas that could alone transform his self-torture into the peace available at the heart of his seemingly endless agitation.

As the Friar’s meditation in Act I of Romeo and Juliet (cited in the epigraph) discloses, the Bard, the redeemingly satirical poet, clearly appreciates the distinction that his Ixionic alterego, Will-I-Am Shake-speare, fails to comprehend. With Greville, he might well say to his namesake: “Fie, fond desire, think you that love wants glory / Because your shadows do yourself benight?” (Caelica 16). The very same eros, the Friar notes, can either save or damn us. It leads us to the blissful contemplation and cultivation of the sempiternal Rose or it becomes the canker within that destructively forestalls all further blossoming because the progeny of lust, manifested in the desolation of both sequences, can only be “tempest after” parching “sun” (V&A 800). True love, by contrast, “comforteth like sunshine after rain” (799). Its perpetual “spring doth always fresh remaine” (801) to nourish human growth and flowering in time. Eros moderated can be a balm to “medicine” (R&J 1.3.24) us; but in unregulated doses, it can only be a lethal “poison” (R&J 1.3.24). Socrates’ eros, our needy yearning oriented toward the divine plenitude, is the “grace” (R&J 1.3.28), the caritas, or daimon, that links the human to the divine, distinguishing man from beast; the poet-persona’s “rude will” (R&J 1.3.28), an unmoderated eros directed toward its own self-gratification, only links man to the beasts, mutilating his very humanity.

Perhaps nowhere in the sequence is this distinction between “rude will” and “grace” more explicitly thematized than in 56’s seemingly self-contradictory effort to clarify a stabilizing distinction between “apetite” (2), with its vicious cycles of feast and famine, and “sweet love” (1), presumably the higher good that “doth always fresh remaine” (V&A 801).18 If we were to depend on the persona’s curious account of the distinction between “apetite” and “sweet love” in Sonnet 56, the desired clarification would never escape muddle-headedness. Like him, we too would welcome a durable firewall between sweet love’s ever engaging benefices and appetite’s physiological laws of diminishing return, the whipsawing extremes of feast or famine, rude will’s gluttonous repletions and ravenous cravings; but it simply baffles sense to argue, as he does here, that the diminution in sweet love he believes he is experiencing can be remedied—or its ever “sweet” distinction from appetite maintained—by a course of therapy that simply apes appetite’s ways, a therapy urging that sweet love’s “edge” rival or even outdo the sharpness of hunger’s pangs, a therapy whose ever more infrequent moments of satisfaction be prized, like precious stones, as “more rare” (14) for no other reason than that they have begun to occur more rarely. Surely this cannot be sweet love’s higher good, a meaningful restoration of love’s boundless powers of renewal and its capacity to link humans to the fullness of being. It is, rather, the miserly, self-deceiving attempt of a waning, “wintry” spirit to make a virtue of the naturalistic necessity to which it has blindly capitulated. It is a fool’s gesture that would in its hidden despair try to make the most of diminishing resources by a painful regimen of depriving oneself of their enjoyment as much as possible so as to intensify the pleasure of their more infrequent occurrence and horde what little one may have left even as one senses, heartsick at it, that the eagerness of passion continues—as does the speaker’s spirit—merely to diminish itself.

Postlapsarians all, we recognize the allure of such thinking, but we also know that this protagonist’s solution to his “fearful anticipation and troubling suspicion” about the viability and enduring power of sweet love as he knows it will not yield the renewal and restoration he seems to imagine it can. The speaker no doubt hopes that the ringing finale of his meditation will end on a satisfyingly high note, but given the illogic of his argument’s development, the thrilling enthusiasm of his final words (“more rare”) cannot escape sounding hollow, even discordantly flat, given the hint of depletion and enervation that cannot be separated from their yearned-for appreciation of the precious.

Even a cursory reading of the sonnet discloses a speaker, like Cleopatra’s Antony, who seems possessed by fears that the sweet love he thinks he understands and now hopes to “renew” (1) has already begun to lose its vitality and force, threatening to reduce him to a state of deprivation he hopes to forestall in the misguided, self-contradictory plea that constitutes the poem’s action. The speaker’s choice of comparisons throughout the piece reveals that, absent “sweet love,” the world of human desires threatens to reduce itself to a bleak, painful, and demoralizing place in which to attempt to survive. Our hungry need for food or sex is “but too [the] daie by feeding . . . alaied, / Too morrow sharpened in his former might” (3–4), more than a bit like a powerfully devouring predator kept off only by regular feedings. The second quatrain may possibly function as elegant variation on this theme (consider, for example, the reiteration of the motif of hunger [6] and the structural repetition involved in “too daie” [ll.3 and 5] and “too morrow” [ll.4 and 7]), intimating a persistent hunger that periodically causes the eyes to “winck” (6) in order, perhaps, to hold back shaming tears resulting from food deprivation.

But an alternative (and seemingly more likely) reading of Q2 involves a complement to, rather than a continuation of, Q1’s line of reasoning. In the world of the lower desires, there can be as much of a problem in feasting as in famine. Overindulgence may have caused the “dulnesse” (8) the speaker senses and fears in the love relationship he prizes in the poem just as too much food or drink can fog alertness and responsiveness, leading even to unconsciousness of the world around us. One cannot be much good to others when too much food or drink induces sleep or, even more embarrassing, waking torpors. One can hope, as does the speaker, that the lover “too morrow see againe” (7) with eyes unblurred by the “dulnesse” (8) resulting from excess or want; but what if the lover should only awaken sufficiently refreshed to endure but another round of more of the same, including recurring satiety, the problem that appears to have crept into the speaker’s suspicion of dulled habituation in the love relationship to which he alludes in the poem (the danger of “perpetual dulness” [8]). In any event, urging someone who may have drunken to excess already to fill the cup again on the morrow hardly seems a promising cure if one’s fear is love’s death from perpetual dullness.

In the volta the speaker hopes to forestall the fears of love’s decline into “perpetual dulnesse” (8) with the lesser evil of a “sad Intrim” (9), in it from which love as he knows it might somehow yet recover, but both figures in the sestet by which he depicts love’s possible renewal are so demoralizingly deprivational and haunted by the subtextual possibility of failing return that whatever optimistic energies with which they may begin cannot finally sustain themselves tonally. In Q3, the speaker seemingly paints a portrait of two newly betrothed lovers making a daily pilgrimage to opposite “banckes” (11) separated by the sea, one waiting in agonized longing and fear for the “returne” (12) of the other, enjoying only the heightened intensity of one meager instant of relief and celebration should either catch a glimpse of the other home from the sea. “Sad Intrim” (9) hardly seems a sufficient depiction of the days, weeks, or even months of empty terror and deprivation endured in order to milk a single moment of reunion of its wrought up joy at the beloved’s safe return, especially when any subsequent departure would result in more of the same all over again. Nor can the experience of such a reunion in itself, to anyone who has actually endured one and the anxiety leading up to it, be called heightened joy with exactitude. The long-lost sight of a beloved returning from radical danger might, in fact, be better described as “hungrie eies” filling “even till they winck with fulnesse” (6), an experience that may participate as much in pain endured and a convulsive release of pent-up tensions as it does tears of joy overbrimming. Should the experience ever need to be repeated (as when the seafarer arrives home merely “on weekend leave”), the lover’s embrace of the returning beloved may seem, moreover, but an “apetite, / Which but to daie by feeding is alaied, / Too morrow sharpned in his former might” (4).

The couplet’s closing hope in Winter’s care-worn (if celebratory) welcome to the relief and renewal of “Somers” (14) seasonal regeneration does not, in sweet love’s absence, fundamentally alter the bleak undersong of Q3 or the rest of the poem, for that matter. It calls to mind, instead, the death-in-life that often prevails in human experience between the vigor of youth and old age’s literal death, the canker within that slowly eats away at the spirit until it leaves the soul atrophied and dependent upon outside stimulation for any joy in its existence. What motivates the anxious speaker to shift from the seafaring figure to one of seasonal renewal in discussing his hope for sweet love’s return is no doubt the greater predictability of “Somers” reappearance after Winter’s “sad Intrim” without it to grace life, but even summer’s generic reliability in resurrecting vigorous life cannot guarantee success in every individual’s case. To that continuing uncertainty, the new figure adds the dark specter of old age’s continuing decline and the potentially unsettling parasitic vicariousness of Winter’s transient relief from its woes in Summer’s presence just as it also hints of even greater stretches of tedium and yearning between celebratory occasions than most sea journeys demand. If it is characteristically human to think in terms of self-regarding anxieties and consolatory rationalizations like the ones we see very much at work crowding out access to generous love in the poem’s speaker here, it may initially seem mean-spirited to characterize Winter’s chilling welcome of Summer’s warmth here as a torpid old lizard’s sunning itself on a rock, his satisfaction requiring no human reciprocity; but to treat the speaker’s celebratory hopes for himself any more gently is to award unearned merit to the speaker’s cure for his own failing desire urged throughout the poem.

Are we to believe, as does the speaker in his desolate hope against hope, that the deprivational cure he imagines will make the satisfactions we periodically salvage “more rare” (14) in the way splendid jewels may be rare or will it simply make them even more scarce than they have been of late? The way Winter seems to feed off of Summer’s return here may well be but an “apetite, / which but too daie by feeding is alaied” (2–3). When in the course of things Summer departs again, Winter may not have truly been refreshed and restored; instead, his hunger may only be “sharpened in his former might” (4). In a spirit that has already begun to lose heart, how could the ebb and flow of appetite’s rhythm of feast and famine, famine and feast—whether manifested in one’s hunger of a day for food, of weeks or months of anxious desire for a glimpse of an absent beloved, or the wan hope of one’s declining years for the return of the summer’s renewal merely in order to keep a pathetic flicker of warmth alive in us—ever serve to “renew [the boundless] force” of “sweet love”? The answer, it would seem, is that it cannot. The “edge” (2) of a willful eros, whether “blunted” (2) by satiety or “sharpned” (4) in deprivation, instead only slowly “kills / The spirit of Love” (7–8), twisting the blade as the draining blood ebbs and flows. Contrary to the poet-speaker’s confused hope, “sweet love” cannot “renew [its] force” by aping an Ixionic pursuit of the rhythm of appetite’s alternating extremes. That is the ruinous hunger that feeds on itself, ever gnawing within. “Sweet love,” the love that the Bard affirms “doth always fresh remain” (V&A 801), prefiguration of Blake’s “soul of sweet delight,” is another and ever generative form of desire and animation. The Bard’s alter ego, rude will/Will’s blindness, is to imagine that one can cure a loss of heart by the painful lower order regimen of famine-intensified feast that he prescribes as a solution to his own blind doubts about love’s capacity to recover its strength otherwise. The truth is that sweet love, the spring that doth ever fresh remain, never loses its vigor; it is the speaker alone who has. He cannot renew the force of sweet love in his life because he’s never known it. In the slavish confinement of his appetitive model of love, he has no clear notion of what sweet love is nor how to feed on its boundlessness.

As long as we remain confined to the dubious therapeutic logic by which the poet-speaker of 56 hopes to separate sweet love from appetite, the distinction between the two can only threaten to collapse upon itself. Happily, however, his is not the last word on the subject available to us here. As the Bard intimates in the amphibological syntax of 24, the figurative truth about the hidden artistic design of 56 (and the entire sequence as we shall see) is that “perspective it is[,] best Painters art” (4). In the benign duplicity of his unparalleled craft, the Bard dramatizes that his art in the sonnets is the poetical equivalent of the anamorphic perspective painter’s skill and wit in making a single painting disclose to careful inspection a second, more complex and dialectically richer, visual field and form, but one that depends for its realization upon a shift in the vantage point from which the viewer initially processed it. In this complex poetic structure, the reader/viewer may “finde where your true image pictur’d lies” (24:6) only after a disconcerting double take in which the viewer realizes that the seemingly “true image,” which initially he may have construed as complete in itself, is nevertheless one that deceptively “lies.” The “true image” that upon initial readings of 56 truly but deceivingly conveyed false good will/Will’s self-contradictory lesson and the reader’s uneasy sense of its inadequacy magically gives way, when the reader’s vantage point rightly shifts, to another rhetorical form entirely. That new perspective renders audible the voice of true good will/Will, a confident lyric declaration that provides a substantial distinction between sweet love and appetite that can sustain itself and thus resolve the tensions tormenting the first speaker and, in turn, provide a cause for celebration of sweet love’s glories that the first speaker’s desperate plea and hope cannot. In this, then, 56 is very much like the perspective paintings alluded to in Richard II: works “which rightly [in other words, straightforwardly] gaz’d upon / Show nothing but confusion,” but “ey’d awry / Distinguish form” (2.2.19–21).

The poem’s truest-speaking voice need not be one urging the speaker himself or some other auditor to recuperate the endless increase of “sweet love” with the cyclic, zero-sum dynamics of “apetite” at all, though at first it may be difficult to imagine otherwise. In the syntax of the first sentence, however, if we take the phrase “be it not said” (1) as a parenthetical qualifier of the previous exhortation (urging that love’s renewal be more than merely “speaking of love” that makes for love’s labors lost) instead of a portion of the subsequent imperative filling out the first quatrain, then the interpretive possibility dawns on us that the speaker need in no way be urging that “sweet love” be renewed by an alternating course of tension and convulsive release, famine and feast. The first sentence then breaks into two imperative constructions, one confidently urging that sweet love renew itself and the other clearly exhorting that the manner in which it multiply its joys should be quite distinct from the way that slavery to appetite constrains and then periodically devours its pleasures. The initial speaker hoped sweet love’s “edge” (2) could be even sharper (and, thus, potentially more lethally extreme) than appetite; the Bard’s soul of sweet delight, however, more wisely urges it to be “blunter” (2) than appetite, arguing in Q2, by way of answer to Q1, that sweet love’s “hungrie eies” (as well as its “I”s and “ayes”) “to daie” may be constantly filled and refilled to overflowing with an endless array of satisfactions from life’s moveable feast, not, as in appetite’s ravenousness, merely “alaied . . . by feeding.” If “too morrow” (the unorthodox orthography allowing us to read the phrase both as the following day and an attitude toward it) our ravenous hunger revives and brightens ferally, “sharpened in his former might,” sweet love’s blunter “edge” on hungry appetite (no sharpened blade at all, but an “increase” or “advantage”) would under true good will/Will’s aegis “too morrow see againe” (7). That is, it would and may, despite appetite’s physiological exigencies, awaken with eyes, I’s, and ayes refreshed from rest induced by the satisfaction of the previous day to see anew and gratefully life’s endless panoply of nurturing delights, and in the process of seeing again “see a gain.” Enriched in such a world of increase, one may step off the wearying treadmill of the first speaker’s fears of diminishment and beyond his confusing definition of sweet love based on the endless fluctuations in the vicious cycle of tension and release.

A comparably magical metamorphosis takes place in Q3 when we realize that only our own failing spirits restrict us to seeing nothing here but a speaker keeping his chin up and a stiff upper lip as he rationalizes that our best hope is to take small consolations amidst the sea of our daily woes. There is no reason lovers ordinarily need to suffer such woeful separations from one another or from “sweet love” in the course of their lives together. Ordinarily, “two contracted new” (10) are virtually inseparable, in fact. Only our tendency to metaphysical self-pity directs us to imagine their story otherwise. The poem in no way insists that the lovers’ daily excursions to the ocean’s shores are made in separation from one another in any but the most unlikely and unfortunate of happenstances. Instead lovers are likely to go to the sea together for a majestic backdrop to the more majestic drama they feel involved in themselves. What they see again and again (ever “a gain”) in their daily devotions is the “returne of love” (12) from one to the other and back again whether the ocean waves’ cyclical flux ebbs or flows. Theirs are happy exchanges of the gift of reciprocity in love, the mutual gift that makes the majestic “view” of the ocean they overlook “more blest” (12). Their only “sad Intrim” is the tedious wait between the daily opportunities for yet more shared intimacies.

The couplet extends this logic to an ever more satisfying climax. If the figure of Winter making “Somers welcome” (14) were meant exclusively to suggest a newly preferred alternative to the comparison of the ocean parting the shore as a figurative way to amplify our sense of the “sad Intrim,” we would not expect to see the couplet set off from the third quatrain as a completely new sentence (the logic by which, I presume, the period at the end of l.12 in Q is most often emended to a semicolon).19 The parallelism this figure completes, however, need not ultimately be meant as a structural repetition in the syntax of the sestet’s resolve but, instead, as an ideational parallel and contrast to the young lovers’ reciprocity in sweet love now announced as a new and better idea the speaker has just had on that subject. We need no longer be in the world of sad interims at all in the couplet; the new comparison could instead postulate a second figure of sweet love “thrice more wish’d, more rare” (14) than the happy image of reciprocal affection generated by the previous portrait of young, carefree lovers exchanging love glances. In this figure both we and a personified Winter joyously celebrate the generosity of spirit of personified “Somers[’] welcome” of aged Winter’s being—a being “full of care”—into her embrace and shelter in order to relieve him of those cares in whatever way she can, like Cordelia relieves her mad father. And even if she should not be successful in that restorative effort, she might yet possess the inner resources and generosity to enjoy her invalid welcomingly in any case. The figure likewise invites us, in turn, to entertain the real possibility that some of Winter’s cares represent a reciprocally appreciative “care” for Summer matching Summer’s care for him and, perhaps, even above and beyond such gratitude, delighting in her very person as profoundly as she in his. Such a matrix of reciprocal feeling constitutes a sweetness in love “thrice more wish’d, more rare” even than the untroubled delights young lovers provide us in the easy reciprocity of their mutual devotion to one another.

Shakespeare’s body may long since have ceased to molder in “perpetual dulnesse” in his damp grave beside the Avon; but “quick now, here now, always” in the resurrected life of reciprocal recognitions like this between writer and reader, true good Will/will’s soul of sweet delight lives anew to share this mirth with us, completely unfazed by death’s waste, even the waste and death he knows we bring on ourselves prematurely when we curtail sweet love’s embrace. At this moment, literally here with us, his sweet spirit “winck(s) with fulness” (6) at us as he shares this complex jest about the joy that’s coming to us in sharing his wit.

Helen Vendler has noted that there is an ironic rhetorical distance between the poet (the figure I’ve identified as Sweet Will himself) and his fictive persona, the self-preoccupied Will-I-Am Shake-speare, in that Shake-speare’s author lives on a different plane of experience knowing and planning “conceptually the gyrations . . . he plans to represent taking place over time in his fictive speaker” (26). From the foregoing analysis of 56 we can see that this chasm is far greater than the one for which Vendler argues. The ironic distance is not solely rhetorical; it is likewise, and more significantly, ideational and spiritual. Out of earshot of the most apparent fictive persona we have now made out another fictive persona’s voice, one with whom the Bard himself is more nearly kin. That voice is not the self-regardingly anxious and inconsequential voice of false good will/Will that puts us on guard for ourselves; it is the placidly confident and heartening voice of true good will/Will himself and itself, enriching our prospects even as it delights us. This voice, articulated by the ingenious artistic “craft of Will” himself is a far cry from the self-deceiving “craft of will” in Will-I-Am Shake-speare’s fearfully anxious efforts to bend fair young man and dark mistress to his wishes throughout the sonnet sub-sequences or that male persona’s female Echo in A Lover’s Complaint. This gracious voice can be heard declaring its soul’s sweet delight again and again in the sequence. It has internalized the life-changing distinction between appetite and sweet love; sublimated cupidity and caritas; rude will and gracious will; lust and love. It is the redeemed and redeeming voice of a soul that realizes the attempt to hold one’s own in love is a waste of time: love either multiplies the goods with which it has been given to work, or, like everything else on earth, it is subject simply to entropic decline. This voice knows how generous love multiplies the delights it shares; self-regarding desire—narcissistic yearning—only diminishes itself and its object in the desperate and futile effort to hold for itself what must slip through its grasp, to end like the faithless steward of the parable from Matthew, stripped of all the good entrusted to his care despite persistent anxiety about its loss. The good steward, sweet good will, “appreciates” the goods in the world in which we live; anything less thankful and creative is but an expense of spirit in a shameful waste: the canker in the rose, beauty wasted from within. For the Bard, “love is a gentle spring” that “doth always fresh remaine” to refresh, renew, and nurture the human spirit, no matter how terribly as creatures of feast and famine we may have previously abused or deprived it of what it most needs. Only “Lust’s winter,” by contrast, constrains this human fecundity by “com(ing) ere summer half be done” (V&A 800–801).