Petrarch Read Online Free PDF Page A

opinionatedness, pessimism or servility, embroidered upon out of a desire to
     amuse or teach a moral lesson. The dark unhappy truth was treated differently, however;
     this was confined to “the middle part,” so-called by Petrarch because of its inherent
     weakness and tendency to mystification (see
Familiares
I, I). These were letters and poems written during periods when he could not cope
     with so many reverses and with the losses to death and misfortune of so many friends
     and relatives. Like the “corruptible” middle part of Plato’s
Republic,
they speak of excess, doubt, and labyrinthine suffering.
    Petrarch’s self-dramatization goes far deeper than caricature in the
Canzoniere.
Following the satiric canzone, poem 23, in which a series of transformations forces
     not only a new and strange conjunction of well-known Ovidian myths but a disturbing
     psychic break with myth itself, Petrarch seems to shrink from connection with the
     past in poem 37, to reach a peak of alienation from history in poem 50 (the five stanzas
     of the canzone a decline of significant models from the dawn to the dusk of poetry),
     then suggest, with a pretense of drawing the line of skirmish in poem 70 (his manifesto),
     that the fatal weakness in the organism resides in the nature of love poetry itself.
     Like Baudelaire, he not only confronts a flawed reality but identifies with it completely,
     as if the secret to moral renewal were in recognizing decadence as both enemy and
     nour-isher of art. In the “canzoni of the eyes,” poems 71-73, an early ascent-summit-descent
     experience, he begins again at the beginning, centering on his first encounter with
     Laura and her meaning for him but concluding with her essentially limited power to
     redeem him in a conventional sense. Poems that seem to aim for the sublime, they raise
     more questions than they answer about the nature of his religious experience and his
     powers to put a language to it. Perhaps his best-known poetic excursion up the mountain,
     poem 129, fails in consummation at a half-way point because the poet reaches a plateau
     where he burrows inward toward a green thought, as if into Dante’s womblike Valley
     of the Princes in the
Purgatorio.
From there, where he can still find the form of Laura in his visible surroundings,
     he regards the high, inaccessible peaks and begins to measure his losses.
    This very persona has succeeded in obscuring Petrarch’s message for the general reader
     over the ensuing centuries. What were clearly radical views in the early and later
     Renaissance (according to Frances Yates, the heretic philosopher Giordano Bruno used
     Petrarchan conceits as emblems for his ideas in his hermetic work
Eroici furori)
lost their sting as time passed, merging with the ancient stream of laments that
     few still examine closely for their historical targets. Following in the path of Dante,
     whose
Vita nuova
created a whole myth about its author with a few sketchy details, Petrarch made his
     figure easy to stereotype by extending his fiction even into his letters. What must
     have been required in the way of self-discipline to carry out such a self-parody—to
     determine the persona who would best express his convictions but in a perverse and
     cogent way so as to maintain both the absurdity and credibility of his character—is
     hinted at in more than one passage in the letters where he speaks of the “double task”
     of maintaining a high moral and philosophical tone while aiming at the lesser art
     of accommodating to the audience, rhetoric’s aim of winning arguments and impressing
     the naive as well as the intelligentsia. Such duplicity carries over into poem 28,
     forexample, where he concludes with a joke at his own expense about his first duty, which
     is to woo the lady while others fight God’s war.
    From the beginning Petrarch seems to have recognized that he would become identified
     with his doppelgänger as his life progressed. In