Petrarch by Mark Musa

preparation for a second coming, enlists all the poem’s elements in the service of
     the friends of Christ. When he wanders off the well-traveled path, as he does in his
     long sonnet series (see table 1, p. xii), it is to escape an impasse. What seems conflicted
     in his thought processes at first, too absolutist or self-defeating in early poems
     such as 22, 30, 66, and 80 (sestinas which seek to fix, in their six recurring rhymes,
     six shades of meaning), begins to loosen and become more supple in these stylistic
     excursions. What distinguishes a sonnet series such as poems 215-236, for example,
     is the way Petrarch makes a penance of experimentation in a group of twenty-two poems
     as rich with earthy vocabulary as any in the work. Again, in poems 150-205 and 333-358,
     it is possible to recognize the free-thinker at work, pushing the limits of doctrine.
     Each sonnet in these series has its own purpose, yet in their variety they reveal
     the ways in which language can be precise or made vague and subjective, both enriched
     and debased by terms meant to serve temporal aims.
    In a philosophic framework Petrarch shows how poetic language sells itself short by
     mesmerizing itself with beauty and exhausting itself with hyperbole. That he succeeds
     in doing this without losing the poem’s value as a mode of communication is a measure
     of his power as an artist. In poem 248—and in poem 261, a companion to that sonnet—after
     he has despaired of a response from the world that might reconfirm the viability of
     his vision (Laura is rumored to have died), he turns back to the Dantesque model as
     if putting
la bella donna
up for a mock sale, advertising her beauty and virtue one last time before death
     overtakes her. It is not that the poetry in these sonnets fails to please, but that
     it hints at a bitter truth with its vain repetitions; in a rhetorical burst of energy
     the poems emphasize the futility of relying on such model human perfection in the
     face of pitiless forces. If the reader is moved to wonder how these sonnets late in Part I are related, it is because history (in this case, political failure as well as the
     Black Death) intrudes on the poet’s dream of persuading us with his eloquence; it
     fractures all reason and gentility.
    In order to perceive how this happens, one may regard the
Canzoniere
as a corpus (a term Petrarch used to describe his collected letters) and the middle
     part from poems150—270 as its inner vitals, and therefore to anticipate that its core poetry will
     be expressed in language “related to the subject matter of our discourse,” as Lady
     Philosophy explained in Boethius’s work,
De Consolatione Philosophiae.
Without a doubt, the first part of the work contains the most brilliant poems, products
     of an intellect in high gear informed by the data of his cultivated senses. When he
     sets off on his travels into lower forms of poetic expression, however, the cerebral
     will be assisted by gut reactions, so that the poet’s tendency to gorge on everything
     at the table in the 56-sonnet cycle (poems 150-205) will be followed by the urgent
     need to purge himself of impurity in poems 215-236. There, in the interest of truth,
     he states the most fundamental facts of his wretchedness. With the mention of wormwood
     in poem 215, for example, he begins a series in which images of evil, death, defecation,
     and delirium create in him and his verse a paroxysm of suffering. Poem 217 finds him
     in a pit of self-disgust, its terms
querela, fervide, fessi
(an unusual form of
facessi,
that is, “would make,” which appears in lines 3 and 7),
I’empia nube, rompesse a l’aura,
and
cruda
sardonically juxtaposed with the last tercet’s
divina … beltate.
Like poem 135, the confessional canzone that precedes his scurrilous attack on the
     papal court in poems 136-141, these sonnets serve a purpose—to shock and fix the attention
     of his audience on his audacity, particularly