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.

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.

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,...