Petrarch Read Free

the sound and the
     sense of their songs. Each undertakes to describea genesis, the origin of the poetic idea, which took the form of a lasting impression
     delivered through sense experience. At the point of perception (a triple knowing,
     as both describe it), the divisions begin that lead in their unfolding to the complexity
     of the poets’ metaphoric and cognitive structures.
    Petrarch’s imaginative landscapes, as well as his protagonists’ virtues and flaws,
     continually recall those of the
Commedia
while giving them a wholly individual aesthetic twist. There are veiled allusions
     in the
Canzoniere
to Dante’s fearless descents to new levels of earthiness and squalor in the
Inferno,
echoes of his polemical fervor, self-mockery, and self-abasement in the
Purgatorio,
his self-aggrandizement and eventual harmonizing of opposing factors in the
Paradiso.
Petrarch’s employment of verbal sleights of hand and his invitation to deep reading
     recall Dante’s devices in his first two canticles, as well as his clarity and questioning
     of the capacity of language to bridge the gap between the physical and metaphysical
     in the second part of the
Paradiso.
    Dante, like Petrarch, invites us to see with the eyes of his protagonist and to imagine
     ourselves as he is in his becoming; but he does so with a sense of proportion always
     in play. He gives his Pilgram rein to wander in error but within the stringent limits
     of a moral system defined ever more clearly as the action unfolds. Petrarch struggles
     against Dante’s limits, seems to go overboard, and learns to adjust to them in the
Canzoniere.
And although Dante may range over the panoply of known history in his
Commedia,
he repeatedly returns, up to the thirtieth canto of the
Paradiso,
to the first item on his agenda, the need to reform his own tortured age, as Petrarch
     does in his lyrics. Both are rooted in the present, in the religious and political
     wars of city-states, papacy, and empire, singlemindedly proselytizing for their moral
     beliefs with their dramas.
    Along with Varro, Boethius in the
Consolatione Philosophiae,
and Dante in the
Vita nuova,
Petrarch is often linked with the tradition of Menippean satires for the variety
     of forms he used in the
Canzoniere,
but his satiric impulse has not been examined to any notable degree in commentary
     on the individual poems themselves. Yet when a political gibe is perceived in poems
     199-200, for example, two sonnets about Lauras hand and glove, a wholly new purpose
     for these poems may emerge. Like a modern political cartoon, poem 199 draws a picture
     of a tiny poet observing the power figure from a vantage point somewhere near the
     tip of his toe (the tough politico dressed in a bridal gown):
    O lovely hand that squeezes my heart tight,
    enclosing in so little space my life,
    hand upon which all art and care was spent
    by Nature and by Heaven for its praise,
    with your five pearls of oriental hue
    whose only bitter cruelness is to wound me,
    those fingers long and soft which naked now
    luckily Love shows me for my enrichment.
    Pure white and gaily light, dear glove
    that covers polished ivory and fresh roses,
    who ever saw on earth such gracious spoils?
    Would that I had as much of her fair veil!
    O the inconstancy of human things!
    But this is theft, and must be taken back.
    The hand without the glove reveals the bright red fingernails and ivory skin of the
     temptress, whose arms will suffocate protest and whose head and face, in poem 200,
     will block out divine light. The hand and glove symbols Petrarch coyly manipulates
     here—because they are known signifiers of monarchy and papacy—he repossesses through
     means of a new sycophantic style in poem 201, maintaining the purity of his original
     vision of Laura in the last lines but indicating that he has discovered the uses of
     flattery—learned to be sly, entered his maturity. This series of “polished” rhymes
     peaks with poem 205, in which