Petrarch Read Free Page B

in nature and in church, doing novenas for her on one occasion). That the site Petrarch
     identified was St. Clare’s may be significant, since as a disciple of St. Francis
     and the nun who founded the order of “poor Clares,” she was most loved for the very
     qualities he celebrates in the
Canzoniere,
for her humility, prudence, natural wisdom, generosity, and beauty of soul, as well
     as for her charity to the poor. Her example may have provided a needed antithesis
     to the Curia that ruled church practice where he worshipped, representing an ideal
     he could not bear to see sunk in “mud” (poem 259) without protesting. Protest he did
     by making one of the aspects of Laura a personification of St. Clare’s Church in captivity.
    On another symbolic level, Laura as Daphne (Ovid’s maiden in
Metamorphoses,
turned into the laurel tree when she spurned the love of Apollo) is the poetic idea
     itself, which the poet pursues through the forests of feeling and thought until he
     almost seizes her, when she becomes the poem on the page, freed of his desire and
     her mortal life, transformed into someone else’s plant to cultivate. This transformation
     is given its primary didactic meaning for Petrarch in poem 23, the canzone of the
     metamorphoses, when he himself becomes the laurel. Until she is transformed into the
     tree, Daphne/ Laura is as light, free, and compelling as the desire which gives rise
     to the idea, or the virginal eye and ear which receive the poem in its finished form.
     She may at various times be herself, the poem, the poet, or the reader.
    That a real Laura existed, however, became legend early in Petrarch’s career. People
     searched for a candidate for her as they had for Dante’s Beatrice (one settled on
     in the eighteenth century was Laura de Sade of Avignon). But details about her in
     the
Canzoniere
are never more than sketchy and ephemeral. “Femina è cosa mobile per natura” (a woman
     is by nature changeable) he admits in poem 183, as if responding to a criticism that
     her character seems to be too variable, changing as often as his style in these “scattered
     rhymes.” Petrarch was well aware of the duplicitous nature of the poetry of any era
     written in praise of the
bella donna,
and he capitalized on it in his own way. If she was to be a projection of his better
     self, how to make her seductive to the reader? If she was to be the object of his
     lust or satirical scorn, how to conceal the edge of his blade in silken trappings?
     But Petrarch also insisted that Laura was more than an envisioning, more than an evocative
     name: “The living Laura by whose person I seem to be captured” was no deception, he
     wrote in a letter to his friend Giacomo Co-lonna, who had questioned her existence.
     “I wish indeed that you were joking about this particular matter, and that she indeed
     had been a fiction and not a madness” (Bishop, p. 31). Neither here nor anywhere else
     does he confirm Laura’s actual identity as a woman, nor his love for her as more than
     a transient passion; but that she was a palpable force is undeniable. The marvelous
     fecundity of the
Canzoniere
lies in his desire to keep her beauty and virtue alive while acknowledging her power
     to lead him astray. Although Petrarch knew that in Augustinian terms he must renounce
     her (in his confessional
Secretum,
the dialogue with St. Augustine that he never published, loveof Laura is acknowledged to be a stumbling block to his salvation), not only her usefulness
     to him as a medium for teaching but also those very intrinsic qualities that make
     the fact or fiction of her being significant continued to hold him hostage to her
     all the years of his life. In recantatory writings, he claimed to have given her up
     (e.g., “The Letter to Posterity”), but in the course of the
Canzoniere
Laura lives long after her death, and he relinquishes his hold on her only at the
     last moment in poem 366 when he gives up