The Poetry of Petrarch

Petrarch: An Introduction

Time is our delight and our prison. It binds all human beings together, since we all share the pleasures and burdens of memory, and we all know the anticipation of cherished goals and the dark prospect of personal mortality. While the problem of living in time is a long-standing preoccupation among philosophers, theologians, and storytellers, in some respects the exploration of temporality might be seen as the special province of lyric poetry, which records moments of heightened awareness in the temporal process and can accumulate a rich and moving record of an individual’s lifelong engagement with time. Lyric poetry both submits to temporality and resists it. Individual poems draw themselves away from the temporal flow, and collections of lyric poems, while they may reflect experience and composition over time, also tend to resist the demands of story, history, and biography.

Francesco Petrarca, known simply as Petrarch, who lived from 1304 to 1374, stands out as a powerful and original lyric poet, particularly for his ability to portray the individual consciousness, examining its subjection to time and inventing strategies to overcome that subjection. Petrarch’s rime sparse, “scattered rhymes,” as he calls them in the opening sonnet of his great collection, revived a practice from the classical world (for instance, the odes of Horace) and fashioned an important paradigm for the modern world. The body of his work, written in the vernacular language of his native Italy and carefully arranged to reflect the chronology and psychology of his own life, became a powerful example of the way that incomplete and even contradictory particles of experience—his own nickname for his collection was Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, “fragments of matters in common speech”—could accumulate to sketch out a powerful story without following the conventions of narrative.

He made this the work of a lifetime, adding to the manuscript and revising its contents over some forty-seven years. The earliest poems date from around the time he fell in love with Laura, in 1327, and the latest were composed in the last year of his life, 1374. Many readers may have a passing acquaintance with the poet, based on a few anthology pieces or the famous versions of Wyatt and Surrey, while being quite unaware of the scope and intricacy of the finished sequence. It is a formidable work for a reader, given its length and its emotional and moral complexity, but it ranks with other literary masterpieces in terms of the concomitant rewards it offers, rewards that have been obscured by its spectacular success, both in its own time and place and as a model to poets of the centuries that followed.

While long interested in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, I ignored Petrarch for many years for two reasons that I suspect are widely shared: the difficulty of the medieval Italian, which is just different enough to isolate Petrarch even from modern readers of his own language; and the impression that what was attractive in the sonnet sequences of subsequent practitioners was their introduction of non-Petrarchan and even anti-Petrarchan elements. That last opinion has been especially harmful, so it is worth stating here, boldly and emphatically, that what we love in the sonnets of Shakespeare and Sidney and Spenser, among others, is in large part a reflection of their having absorbed and continued Petrarch’s powerful example. They may occasionally repudiate some aspects of stale Petrarchan rhetoric (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), but their subjects and structures, their thoughtful portrayals of the self, immersed in love and time, all owe their considerable power to the master’s originating example. As that recognition dawned for me, I knew I had no choice but to try to produce a modern version of this neglected masterpiece.

I feel as though I am recovering a lost treasure, partly because Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, who had such a hand in shaping twentieth-century tastes in poetry, embraced Dante and repudiated Petrarch, when in fact a better acquaintance with the latter would probably have benefited the work of both. Trying to produce a clone of the Divine Comedy in our world makes very little sense, really. Understanding the structural and stylistic lessons of the rime sparse, by contrast, is still very much worth a poet’s while. If the high modernists did not quite know how to value Petrarch, their heirs, the postmodernists, ought to be quick to recognize his relevance. Like them, he is distracted, playful, eclectic, and many-minded.

The body of poetry he organized is essentially a love story, one marked by failure and frustration in life and an expectation of something better after death. It reflects the originating example of St. Augustine, in his Confessions, documenting the moral and spiritual growth of an individual through the painful lessons of experience, a process of maturing and aging by means of frustration, error, and loss. But Petrarch was not simply reiterating the Augustinian experience, nor was he tied to Dante’s example, in the Vita Nuova, of conversion, through love of a woman, to a knowledge of and union with God. Dante’s account is securely didactic and spiritual, partly because he arranged his sonnets in a useful order and then connected them with prose commentary that both narrates their circumstances and expounds their meanings. By dropping the prose passages between poems, Petrarch, as several commentators have pointed out, opened his sequence to more meanings and less interpretive constraint.1

Furthermore, while his story shapes itself to a Christian conclusion, its world is far more secular, more richly ambivalent, than that of any predecessor. It both celebrates and condemns eroticism, making the beauty of this earthly life an enticing alternative to the heavenly realm. Eventually, of course, as old age ripens and death approaches, that worldly alternative is rejected. While Petrarch never achieves a union with Laura in the course of the sequence, he does find, after her death, that he is learning to master his desire and take in the importance of focusing on the afterlife. There is a crescendo of wonder, confidence, and reconciliation in the last third of the sequence, culminating in the final tribute to another woman, the Virgin Mary.

Petrarch succeeded, we might say, in portraying what theologians call the double motion of the soul, its simultaneous attraction to the earthly and to the heavenly. In doing so, he complicated the schematics of medieval Christianity and confirmed what we all know from our own experience: to live in time is to experience continually contradictory impulses and responses, gusts and vagaries of emotion and thought. He demonstrated that a lifetime of such experience, accurately recorded, can perform what looks like a graceful arc from a distance and reveals a turmoil of conflicting possibilities up close. It can, in other words, constitute a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.2

For that reason, as well as for its size, power, and eloquence, Petrarch’s documentation of his emotional growth, the shape of his life and love, proved so persuasive that it spawned an excess of imitators and imitations. The adulation eventually obscured the remarkable freshness and originality of his achievement. What looked easy to imitate is in fact inimitable. Its balance is too delicate and exact, its stylistic mix too carefully calculated. Thus, Petrarch needs to be rescued from Petrarchism in the same way that original thinkers such as Aristotle, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche may need to be rescued from their own subsequent disciples and adulterators. The disreputable formulas of Petrarchan style that held European poets in thrall for two centuries have little to do with this poet or his work. Petrarch’s imitators mistook the surface rhetoric of contrary emotions—the cold heat, the bitter sweetness, the healing wounding, and so forth—for the experience that underlies them. They tended to ape the rhetoric without really sustaining the vision of existence that tells us how complicated our emotional lives can be. Our emotions seldom exist unalloyed, without their opposites, and the texture of our life is a rich compound of loss and gain, pleasure and pain, interesting at every moment for its mixed and contrary features.3

As soon as the rhetoric loses its emotional underpinning, it sounds silly. But in Petrarch’s hands it is the instrument of a vision that implicitly questions the account of our life proposed by the Christian theology he espoused and embraced.

* * *

Probably the best way for English-speaking readers to approach the meaning and nature of Petrarch’s achievement is through comparison with his most adept reader in English, William Shakespeare. The fact that our own culture has a lively and extensive appreciation of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence gives us an excellent gateway to an appreciation of Petrarch. In Shakespeare’s sequence we find a shorter but remarkably comparable example of the cumulative power a sonnet cycle can develop. Centered on the problem of Eros, and documenting the blisses and frustrations of trying to realize and sustain human love through time, both sequences show us a development not only in the remarkable mastery of a highly expressive form through repeated experiment but also, as I suggested earlier, a development in the poet’s moral and spiritual understanding. A thoughtful poet can make excellent use of the repeated engagement with a compact poetic instrument, the sonnet, that is partly a formal and musical challenge and partly an opportunity for introspection, address to the beloved, and even a sort of journal keeping. Over time (the traditional enemy here being gradually turned to the prisoner’s advantage) the sonnet becomes an instrument of meditation and a measure of accumulating insight.

Pleasure grows out of pain in such circumstances, partly for the artist and more surely for the reader, who can sample powerful erotic currents and witness the obsessions that develop around deprivation and disappointment from a vantage of relative safety. It is as though the sonnet sequences give us gloves for the safe handling of hot or radioactive materials. The gloves lift messy emotions up and reconfigure them in bright formal patterns, musical and elegant. As we read, enjoying the pleasures of form, the graceful dance of language, we also grow in self-knowledge and understanding.

“All right,” my reader may say at this point. “I see the value of the analogy between Shakespeare’s sonnets and those of Petrarch. But the difficulties I may have with the former—the sonnet form, the love conventions, the way in which the moral and spiritual growth is interlaced with clever comparisons and extravagant wordplay—are greatly compounded in the latter. For one thing, there is the matter of sheer size. Petrarch’s poetic sequence contains three hundred and sixty-six lyrics! How am I to find my way around in this gigantic collection?”

The point is well taken. This is a life’s work, and it does not present us with a simple, engrossing story. Dante, for one comparison, and the Beowulf poet, for another, belong to equally foreign worlds and distant cultures, but they hold us as readers or listeners by the power of their tales, the desire to learn what happens next. What will guide us through the labyrinth that Petrarch constructed? What will help us both to appreciate individual poems and to remain oriented to the work’s larger concerns?

There is no simple answer to these questions other than my confident assertion that Petrarch grows on you and that the freedom of movement he gives us to explore his labyrinth is an interesting alternative to the seductions and constraints of narrative. If he took forty-seven years to assemble it, we certainly may—and should—take our time in getting fully acquainted with it. For the purposes of this introduction I have selected three groups of poems from different phases of the sequence. I will use these samplings to demonstrate how the sequence moves steadily forward while always both anticipating and looking back. I can also show how the poems carry on a kind of conversation among themselves, maintaining their discreteness and completeness while contributing, always, to the growth of the whole.

* * *

Take, for the first cross section, poems 11 through 18. They illustrate, as a group, the reigning aesthetic of the sequence, which delights in variation and elaboration while using a single point of reference to tether so much variety. All eight of these poems concern Laura, but in quite different ways. Poem 11 (which, by the way, is a ballata, a variation on the sonnet form) is addressed directly to her, pointing out that she was kinder and more generous with her presence before the speaker revealed his love for her. Now, he reminds her, she tends to veil herself when he is present, adding to his torment because he can’t gaze at her. In Number 12, still addressing her, he speculates on whether her aging may eventually diminish her beauty and thereby lessen his pain. He wonders if such a modification would make him bolder:

then Love may also grant me timely courage

to speak at last of my great suffering,

to tell you of its years, its days, its hours …

In a sense, of course, that anticipated moment, “at last,” is realized by the present circumstance of the poem, since the lyric itself is speaking about his suffering in the way he hopes he will be able to speak to her, directly and frankly, someday in the distant future. This is a good example of the strategies lyric poems employ to defeat time; two different times cohabit in the poem, anticipating aging, growth, and an improvement in the Laura–Petrarch relationship.

In Number 13 the speaker says that when Laura appears among other women, his desire of her increases by as much as the others fall short of her perfect beauty:

When now and then among the other ladies,

Love makes his home within her charming face,

the ways in which each one can’t match her beauty

renew desire, and my passion thrives.

This time, however, the insight about her superior beauty leads not to the complaint we’ve come to expect but to celebration:

I bless the place, the time, I bless the hour

that raised my eyes so high; and thus I say:

“Soul, you must give both deep and hearty thanks

that for that honor you were first picked out.”

While poems 11 and 12 were addressed to Laura, 13 is self-divided and turns to self-address (“Soul”) as well as to a renewed enthusiasm and energy. But Number 14 recognizes that self-division can be quite painful, and it relapses emotionally, with the speaker now addressing his own eyes. He warns them about the effect of seeing Laura and encourages them to cry and anticipate their eventual “martyrdom.”

The next poem, 15, continues the note of despair, using the fact of physical separation from the beloved. Laura is now being directly addressed again. Amor, the love god who figures as an active third party and enemy throughout the sequence, intervenes, reminding the poet of the body-spirit separation all lovers experience. According to Amor, this is a privilege, a rarefaction.

In Number 16 we have an apparent change of scene and subject, as the poet launches into a touching anecdote about an old man setting off on a pilgrimage to see the Veronica relic in Rome. That, of course, turns out to be analogous to the speaker’s search for Laura’s face, echoing the situation described in poem 11. What has seemed like a shift of attention is eventually a reiteration of the reigning obsession.

In Number 17, still separated by some distance from the lady, the speaker contemplates the combination of suffering and redemption she seems to inspire in him. His dependence on her creates upheavals in his nature and further spirit-body disruptions. In Number 18, still looking back toward her, he takes stock of the damage his passion is doing him and anticipates his own blindness and death. Again, his speaking of these things involves him in paradox, since his claims that “I go in silence” and “what I really want/is solitude in which to shed my tears” are contradicted by the very fact of the poem itself.

This group of poems, chosen from early in the sequence, helps illustrate the variety of approaches—shifts of address, changes of mood, use of anecdote, exploration of the divided self—that Petrarch employs to keep the sequence moving forward without becoming too repetitive. Some readers will find it repetitive anyway, but they will at least want to acknowledge that each poem takes a new tack, not necessarily predictable from the poem preceding it, and that there are surprising changes of tone and direction within the poems as well. We are in the presence, as I’ve said, of an aesthetic that delights in extravagance, both of representation and of repetition. It values elaboration, imitation, and variation, unlike our own tendency to prefer economy and originality. We need to let that aesthetic carry us where it will, having faith in Petrarch’s own standard of excellence. And for all the variations we will encounter, there is of course one constant: always the subject, implied or explicit, is Laura, and always there is the duality that his hopeless love for her visits upon him: a sense of deprivation and sorrow combined with an exhilaration at his spiritual enhancement and artistic growth.

* * *

Let us move deeper into the sequence now and look at a group that runs from 107 to 118. These twelve poems begin and end with time references that are quite explicit: in poem 107 Petrarch says he is in the fifteenth year since he fell in love with Laura; by 118 we hear that he has just completed his “sixteenth year of sighs.” Thus, among other things, we’re aware of the passing of a year as we move through this segment of the sequence and of how long this frustrating passion has preoccupied the poor poet. Fifteen or sixteen years of unrequited love is a great deal, and Petrarch presumably has our sympathy, as well as a measure of impatience for his persistent self-pity. Meanwhile, his growth in self-awareness and spiritual sophistication is an apparent product of the tension in his life and consciousness between change, over time, and constancy as a form of resistance.

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

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

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

The visit calms me down, and now those sparks,

at nones, at vespers, dawn and angelus,

can fill my thoughts, which have become so tranquil

that I am free of cares or painful memories.

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

the way that thunder comes along with lightning

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

along with a sweet greeting from her lips.

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

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

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

I’ve now passed through my sixteenth year of sighs

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

and yet it sometimes seems to me as though

this suffering began just recently.

The bitter now is sweet, my losses useful,

living itself’s a heavy weight—I pray

my life outlasts this fortune and I fear

Death may close those eyes that give me speech.

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

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

* * *

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

The time is gone, alas, when I could live

refreshed amid the fire; the one I wept for

passed away, the one I wrote about,

but left me with my pen and all these tears.

Her face is gone, so sanctified and charming,

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

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

as if enveloped in her lovely mantle.

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

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

Love could be

good friends with Chastity, and lovers might

sit down together and talk naturally.

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

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

as I go around with graying hair

all I can think about is what she’s like

and what it meant to see her lovely veil.

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

Oh, transitory hopes, oh, crazy thoughts!

The grass is grieving and the waters troubled,

the nest is cold and empty where she lay …

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

Even the extent to which she may have reciprocated Petrarch’s feelings of admiration is unclear. Sometimes she is kind to him. More often, she is stern, usually because he speaks to her inappropriately of his love. They see each other only occasionally, and these occasions become extremely precious to him. She greets him politely on the street, in passing, and he is enraptured. He sees her in a pageant. He encounters a group of her friends and asks after her, discovering that her husband has confined her to the house. He watches her meet Charles, the Holy Roman emperor. He sees her without gloves on her hands and wishes to keep a glove. She demands it back, but he cherishes the memory. He walks where she has walked and sits where she has sat, just so he can go on thinking about her beauty and her goodness. From time to time, as we have noted, he commemorates the anniversaries of their first meeting, reflecting with melancholy on how long and how fruitlessly he has loved her.

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

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

* * *

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

It should not surprise us that this two-part asymmetric form is also the basic structure of the sonnet, with its eight-line complication, its shift or volta, and its six-line resolution. Thus the shape of a life, the shape of a sequence, and the shape of a form that makes up the predominant means of composing it are all in accord with one another. Petrarch writes in other forms, of course, including the sestina, the canzone, the madrigal, and the ballata. But the sonnet is what sustains him, and he records his feelings and experiences in it faithfully, sometimes in groups, sometimes in individual poems.9

Not every poem in the sequence is about Laura; there are political tirades, tributes to other friends, laments for deaths and other losses, advice to those who may or may not ignore it, tributes to nature, meditations on history and mythology, accounts of dreams, occasional poems written to accompany gifts, invitations, apologies for declining invitations, and many other subjects. Always, though, Laura is at the center, an emotional polestar, a source of both stability and torment, love and anger.

We know that Petrarch led a busy life, with much travel and many relationships (including the fathering of two illegitimate children). In the sequence, however, the central drama to which the poems return again and again involves a kind of triangle: there is Petrarch, there is Laura, and there is the love god, Cupid or Eros or just plain Love, who rules Petrarch’s heart and enslaves him to his love for Laura. Cupid might be thought of as the personified equivalent of some of our modern ideas about biological imperatives and sex drives. He undermines self-control, and he blinds us to larger realities by dominating our senses. A pagan presence in a Christian poem, he is a powerful contradiction to the way that the Church says the world is supposed to work.

The love god’s presence also helps focus the lover’s anger. By blaming Love and his abusive tyranny, Petrarch can deflect the anger he feels toward Laura and overcome his temptation to resent the fact of her physical beauty. She is the subject of his obsession, but she is not to blame. Cupid is, and Petrarch in turn, for being defeated by him. It is a curious combination of metamorphosis and steadiness; a changeable reality is what gives Cupid his dominance over fickle human beings. But the dominance, in Petrarch’s case at least, leads not to fickleness but to fidelity, an unwavering love for Laura and Laura alone. That is the trick the poet plays on the god of love. Eventually, through death and redefinition, his love and fidelity reward him, training the tormented poet to an understanding of heavenly love and heavenly beauty, values which Laura is able to represent fully only after she has left the earth.

The result echoes St. Augustine, but it also invokes poets such as Ovid and Horace, whom Petrarch admired, and it tells a story that seems at times to outdistance in complexity and peculiarity the theology that quite naturally underpins it. Petrarch faces the modern world, but he also faces the medieval world and, beyond it, the classical world. That comprehensiveness accounts in great part for his mastery. Adolfo Bartoli, writing in 1884, put it very well:

This descent into his own spirit, with its seizing of its griefs and joys, its making of a fleeting moment an immortal poem; this self-scrutiny, turning every impulse into art; this abandonment of medieval symbolism and transcendental idealism; this seeing of humanity plain, feeling it in all its truth—this is what makes Petrarch the first lyric poet of the new time, the heir of antiquity and the herald of the great art of the modern world.10

* * *

Translating is a most peculiar activity. On the one hand it seems inevitably doomed both to inadequacy and to incompleteness. On the other hand it offers a kind of loaves-and-fishes legerdemain: where one poem existed, two now stand, related but different, alike but occupying different linguistic territories and, in some cases, different ages and eras. Is a translated poem the evil twin of the original, or is it a miraculous clone, a musical transposition whereby one valuable thing is replicated, its value effectively doubled? A lifetime of translating—Rilke, Holub, Tu Fu, Neruda, Yu Xuanji—has never completely resolved this question for me. If one could read fluently, confidently, in every known language, one would have no need of translators or translations; one could read Homer on Mondays, Akhmatova on Tuesdays, Swahili poets on Wednesdays, and so on. Barring that, however, this imperfect art is one we at least need to tolerate, perhaps even welcome. And poets, I would argue, are the best equipped to succeed as translators of poetry. Just as you would turn to a composer to get effective musical transposition, you need a poet to wrestle a poem from one language into another, the latter being the one in which he or she has some skill at making poems.

Personally, I translate poems for the same reason that I seek out and read translations: to develop acquaintance with poets and poetry I might not otherwise be able to know. In the case of Petrarch, I began producing versions of his sonnets to share with my students who were trying to understand the tradition in which Shakespeare worked. I wanted something that would feel contemporary to them, written in a living language they would recognize as poetry, and something that would also retain the flavor and distinctiveness of the past. A difficult prescription, surely, but a worthwhile negotiation involving two languages, two times, two sets of possibilities.

My solution was to retain the part of Petrarch’s formality that was manageable—a regularity of meter that would also recall Shakespeare’s example—without attempting to replicate the difficult rhyme schemes. Italian rhymes much more readily than English, and searching for ways to make a rhyme scheme function can do serious injury to syntax, imagery, tone, and sense. Rhymes do occur throughout my versions, but they are internal rhymes, incidental rhymes, consonantal rhymes, and so forth, free from the demands of strict pattern but part, nevertheless, of an overall musicality.

Meter, while very demanding in its own right, allows for considerable flexibility of expression. Its challenge would keep me alert, I hoped, sensitive to Petrarch’s climate and aesthetic, without cutting off access to my own language and my own world, my sense of how to make literary style into a living presence, a voice on the page, speaking authentically to listeners and readers of the same time and place. (The sestinas are the one exception to my consistent commitment to iambics.)

All in all, I have tried to stay close to Petrarch’s diction, syntax, and tone, not wishing to impose my own sensibility or vocabulary on what was so well thought out and so remarkably consistent in the first place. My “liberties,” where they occur, come from the constraints of meter and the desire to be clear and straightforward. Perhaps it will be useful to illustrate my method with one of Petrarch’s better-known sonnets. Here is the Italian of Number 189:

Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio

per aspro mare a mezza notte il verno

enfra Scilla et Caribdi, et al governo

siede ’l signore anzi ’l nimico mio;

à ciascun remo un penser pronto et rio

che la tempesta e ’l fin par ch’ abbi a scherno;

la vela rompe un vento umido eterno

di sospir, di speranze et di desio;

pioggia di lagrimar, nebbia di sdegni

bagna et rallenta le già stanche sarte

che son d’error con ignoranzia attorto.

Celansi i duo mei dolci usati segni,

morta fra l’onde è la ragion et l’arte

tal ch’ I’ ’ncomincio a desperar del porto.

An English prose version of this by Robert Durling reads as follows:

My ship laden with forgetfulness passes through a harsh sea, at midnight, in winter, between Scylla and Charybdis, and at the tiller sits my lord, rather my enemy;

each oar is manned by a ready, cruel thought that seems to scorn the tempest and the end; a wet, changeless wind of sighs, hopes, and desires breaks the sail;

a rain of weeping, a mist of disdain wet and loosen the already weary ropes, made of error twisted up with ignorance.

My two usual sweet stars are hidden; dead among the waves are reason and skill; so that I begin to despair of the port. (Durling, 334)

Durling’s version reconfigures some of the syntax, changing, for example, what is literally “the sail is burst by a wet, eternal wind of sighs, hopes, and desires” into something that is more comfortable in terms of English word order, but it is otherwise extremely faithful.

As it happens, we have a wonderful translation of this sonnet by the sixteenth-century English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt:

My galy charged with forgetfulness

Thorrough sharpe sees in wynter nyghets doeth pas

Twene Rock and Rock; and eke myn enemy, Alas,

That is my lord, sterith with cruelness;

And every owre a thought in rediness,

As tho that deth were light in such a case.

An endles wiynd doeth tere the sayll a pase

Of forced sightes and trusty ferefulnes.

A rain of teris, a clowde of derk disdain

Hath done the wered cordes great hinderaunce,

Wrethed with errour and eke with ignoraunce.

The starres be hid that led me to this pain,

Drowned is reason that should me confort,

And I remain dispering of the port.

Wyatt has to leave a few things out, and his first two rhymes may charge his galley with an excess of sibilance, but his language is pungent and direct, a strong response to Petrarch’s Italian. Had he done the whole sequence, instead of just a few of the sonnets, I might not have felt the need to undertake this project!

Next, for comparison, is a rhymed version by Thomas Bergin, done in the twentieth century but not untypical of the nineteenth-century fashion for translating Petrarch:

Charged with oblivion my ship careers

Through stormy combers in the depth of night;

Left lies Charybdis, Scylla to the right;

My master—nay my foe sits aft and steers.

Wild fancies ply the oars, mad mutineers,

Reckless of journey’s end or tempest’s might;

The canvas splits ’gainst the relentless spite

Of blasts of hopes and sighs and anxious fears.

A rain of tears, a blinding mist of wrath

Drench and undo the cordage, long since worn

And fouled in knots of ignorance and error;

The two sweet lights are lost that showed my path,

Reason and art lie ’neath the waves forlorn:

“What hope of harbor now?” I cry in terror.

(Bergin, 334)

This is quite skillful, though I feel that the attachment to traditional English poetic diction, including contractions such as ’gainst and ’neath, as well as phrases like “wild fancies” and “waves forlorn,” makes Petrarch sound too much like a perfunctory late Romantic. Key details, such as the facts of midnight and winter, get blurred when presented merely as “the depth of night.” Preserving the rhyme scheme is an honorable challenge, but it’s worth asking whether the matching of wrath and path, worn and forlorn, and error and terror really does that much to enhance the poem. At the same time, it’s impossible not to admire the difficult commitment to rhyme and meter that Bergin manages to sustain here.

Here is my own version, which has benefited, among other things, from Wyatt’s choice of galley for the vessel of the opening line:

My galley, loaded with forgetfulness,

rolls through rough seas, at midnight, during winter,

aiming between Charybdis and sharp Scylla;

my lord, ah no, my foe, sits at the tiller;

each oar is wielded by a quick, mad thought

that seems to scorn the storm and what it means;

an endless wind of moisture, of deep sighs,

of hopes and passions, rips the sail in half;

tears in a steady downpour, mists of hate,

are loosening and soaking all the ropes,

ropes made of ignorance, tangled up with error.

The two sweet stars I steer by are obscured;

reason and skill are dead amid the waves;

and I don’t think I’ll ever see the port.

My hope is that this captures the drama and energy of the original without either modernizing it excessively or leaving it sounding or feeling too archaic. It is a poet’s, rather than a scholar’s, version—I have found a nice off rhyme in Scylla and tiller, and I like the contrasting music of, for example, lines 5 and 6—but I have tried to hew very closely to the exact sense of the Italian text.

Readers will judge my success or failure for themselves, but I wish to acknowledge here the value that other translators have brought to my enterprise. Foremost is the aforementioned Robert K. Durling, whose Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, with facing-page English prose and Italian originals, was invaluable to me. Again and again I strayed from the sensible diction and shrewd syntax of Durling’s versions in search of alternatives, only to return eventually to his model and his vision. I have wanted to have poetry where he was content with prose, but little else separates us. His Petrarch is my Petrarch—the man, the writer, the reader, the technician, the jokester—and I am considerably in his debt. Even my explanatory notes tend to echo his, and they largely adopt his format. Why quarrel with success?

Two other recent scholarly translators have treated Petrarch in much the same way I do, faithful to meter but dispensing with rhyme scheme. I encountered James Wyatt Cook’s version early on, and kept it at hand, sometimes to quarrel with its choices, sometimes to admire them. Mark Musa’s version came to my notice when I was well along in the project, and thereafter I found it quite useful as well. I was interested in the notes and perspectives of these translators, as well as in their solutions to problems of diction and syntax.

I also found, late in the process, a translator who had tried doing a selection from Petrarch in contemporary free verse, Nicholas Kilmer, and another one who has recently attempted to do the entire sequence using off rhymes, J. G. Nichols. While disagreeing with their solutions, I found their efforts instructive. One other book was at hand as I worked, a limited edition of Petrarch sonnets put together by Thomas G. Bergin; this selection assembles formal versions from several centuries, including the version of Number 189 quoted earlier. These examples helped persuade me of the folly of trying to rhyme; they tend to make Petrarch sound like a second-rate Elizabethan poet crossed with a third-rate Victorian. But some surprisingly graceful efforts turned up as well, particularly those of Morris Bishop, who also wrote a charming biography that I found helpful as background reading.

After some pondering, I decided that this need not be a bilingual edition, a choice that makes for a mercifully smaller book. The decision was based partly on the ready availability of the Durling, Cook, and Musa versions, all with facing-page Italian, and partly on the fact that Petrarch’s text is now easily available on the Internet, in Seth Jerchower’s “Petrarchan Grotto,” which can be found at http://petrarch.freeservers.com. It is essentially the same text as Cook’s and also quite close to those of Durling and Musa.

Oberlin College’s Petrarch connection is of particular interest to me. The greatest Petrarch scholar of the twentieth century, Ernest Hatch Wilkins, happened also to have been Oberlin’s president from 1927 to 1945. As I worked, I liked to imagine that his benign shade was occasionally encouraging my efforts. If so, it may have been joined by that of Andrew Bongiorno, from whom I learned about Dante when I became his much younger colleague at Oberlin, and whose high standards of scholarship were always an inspiration to me. I never knew Wilkins, of course, but hearing Bongiorno talk about him gave me familiarity with his scholarly achievements long before I began to think of translating his favorite poet.

My colleague Martha Collins made a particularly significant contribution to this project. She encouraged my commitment to meter and brought her own accurate ear and eye to the careful critique of my efforts, from an early stage on down to the completion. I owe her a great deal. I am also grateful to other readers who helped me polish and refine my efforts, especially Georgia Newman, my wife, and John Hobbs and David Walker, two other colleagues at Oberlin. Jonathan Galassi contributed many excellent suggestions that helped make the translations more consistently faithful to the Italian. Gaetano Prampolini very kindly read this introduction and pointed out some errors. Two monthlong residencies helped give me the time and concentration to complete this project, one from the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria in 2001, the other a Witter Bynner Fellowship at the New Mexico Institute for the Arts in 2002. For the help and encouragement I received at both places, my deepest thanks.

A Powers Travel Grant from Oberlin College that enabled me to visit sites where Petrarch lived and worked, particularly the Vaucluse and the Fontagne de Sorgue, as well as Mount Ventoux, during the summer of 2002, was also instrumental to the completion of this project.

Finally, if it does not seem too strange and awkward, let me thank my friend Petrarch. To occupy the world of another poet’s work at great length is to develop an intimacy that resembles friendship. There are bound to be quarrels and misunderstandings, but there is something that feels like mutual exchange, trust, and candid appraisal. Petrarch enjoyed his friendships and put a high value on them. So do I. Like others, I have found this man fascinating in his flawed humanity, admirable in the honesty and detail of his self-portraiture. His company has been a privilege. To honor it, I would like to close with the characterization that Wilkins used to preface his 1961 Life of Petrarch:

He was and is remarkable for his awareness of the entire continent on which the drama of European life was being enacted; for his awareness of the reality of times past and times to come; for the breadth and variety of his own interest (he was, among many other things, a gardener, a fisherman, and a lutanist); for the high dedication of his writings; for his persistent belief in Rome as the rightful capital of a unified world, governed politically by an Emperor and religiously by a Pope; for his scholarly precocity and for the valiant industry of his old age; for the honors he received and for the hostilities he incurred; for his faithfulness to the study and writing that constituted his most important occupation; and most of all for the vast range, the deep loyalty, and the unfailing helpfulness of his friendships. (v)

Works Cited

Barolini, Teodolinda. “The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” MLN, vol. 104, no. 1, January 1989, 1–38.

Bergin, Thomas G. The Sonnets of Petrarch. Heritage Press, 1966.

Bishop, Morris. Petrarch and His World. Indiana University Press, 1963.

Cook, James Wyatt. Petrarch’s Songbook. Pegasus Press, 1995.

Durling, Robert K. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. Harvard University Press, 1976.

Hainsworth, Peter. “Laden with Oblivion,” Times Literary Supplement, May 18, 2001, 25.

Kalstone, David. Sidney’s Poetry: Context and Interpretations. Harvard University Press, 1965.

Kilmer, Nicholas. Songs and Sonnets from Laura’s Lifetime. North Point Press, 1981.

Lewis, C. S. English Literature of the Sixteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1954.

Musa, Mark. Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works. Oxford World’s Classics, 1985.

———. Petrarch: The Canzoniere. Indiana University Press, 1996.

Nichols, J. G. Petrarch, Canzoniere. Carcanet, 2000.

Thompson, David. Petrarch, a Humanist Among Princes: An Anthology of Petrarch’s Letters and of Selections from His Other Works. Harper & Row, 1971.

Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. The Making of the “Canzoniere” and Other Petrarchan Studies. Edizioni di Storia e Litteratura, 1951.

———. Life of Petrarch. University of Chicago Press, 1961.

———. Petrarch’s Later Years. Medieval Academy of America, 1959.