Petrarch Read Free Page A

the word
dolce
(sweet) is repeated thirteen times. Poem 208, on the other hand, is a no-holds-barred
     attack on the papacy that defines his terms unmistakably. Its tone of pious servility
     barely masks a scorn more carefully concealed in other poems but nonetheless enduring,
     reappearing at the end of the
Canzoniere
in sonnets that address the most exalted subject matter.
    Petrarch probably meant for the reader to be reverent and amused at the same time
     in reading these poems, to hear the echo of doubt or mockery or humor in them, and
     to recognize the serious implications. It is doubtful that he ever intended merely
     to amuse with his occasional vulgarity and parody of style but more likely that when
     his lover is precious, fatuous, falsely pious, naively bouyant, or blinded by tears,
     the poet is asking the reader to look beyond the obvious and comic to causes and effects,
     to see how the poem fits into an argument and leads to the next. Few poems in the
Canzoniere
are free of the taint of his questioning. In the well-known “whore of Babylon” series,
     for example (poems 136-141), Petrarch’s hatred of the corrupt papal court in Avignon
     expresses itself in language inferred earlier in numerous lyrics to his lady.
    Petrarch was known to speak of his historical time as a continuation of the dark ages
     whose most striking symptom of decay was the removal of the papal court from Rome
     to Avignon in 1309. On this fertile ground for romance, intrigue, and religious and
     political protest, he constructed the materials of the
Canzoniere.
When the family was forced into exile from Florence in the same purge of Whites that
     banished Dante in 1302, and when it had left Italy for Avignon in 1311 (Francesco
     was seven), he experienced a beginning in discontinuity which provided the background
     for one of the central paradoxes of the work. He found himself at an early date entangled
     in the affairs of an establishment he scorned, in a locale that he came to love with
     all the passion of which he was capable, having left behind a city, Florence, which
     had disenfranchised him. Avignon became the poet’s labyrinth and his purgatory, a
     “Babylon” to which he voluntarily returned for many years to serve as cleric and diplomat
     for cardinals and popes. Although he made frequent descents into the “open valley”
     of his native land and traveled into many regions of Europe, it was not until 1353
     that he left Avignon for the last time. Vaucluse, on the other hand, was the beloved
     place of retirement from worldly affairs that completed the triangle with Italy and
     Avignon—Petrarch’s link with the beauty of nature, with solitude, and with literary
     pursuits. In this small village a short distance from Avignon, where the wilderness
     came right up to the edge of his garden but where he felt completely safe and in possession
     of himself, he was able to sit at his desk and imagine another kind of wilderness
     across the plain, in the palaces of the papal city.
    Petrarch first saw Laura in the Church of St. Clare in Avignon on 6 April 1327 (the
     location written by the author on the flyleaf of his copy of Virgil, which survives,
     and the date in poem 211 of the
Canzoniere),
a primal experience he first locates in space in poem 3 and to which he returns as
     if to a stillpoint throughout the collection.Like all the facts about himself that Petrarch chose to reveal in prominent or out-of-the-way
     writings, this one had its peculiar significance for him; but it has been obscured
     by another tradition somewhat supported by the text that reveals their meeting to
     have been on the wooded bank of the Sorgue, near Vaucluse, where Laura walked or bathed
     one day with her friends. Such mixing of sacred and profane allegory was common at
     the time and indicated the multiform purpose the maiden served (Huizinga has noted,
     p. III, that Petrarch’s contemporary, Machaut, located his dalliance with Peronnelle