Petrarch by Mark Musa Page A

in poems 227-229 with their frankly
     Dionysian elements, from earliest times accompaniments of war and disease. They prepare
     the way for the art of poems 237-239, poems perhaps closest to his heart. Poem 236
     wryly sums up the rationale for his daring. Nothing in the work will match the 22-sonnet
     cycle for explicitness, although poems 333-358 resemble it in their proximity to death,
     and the last sestina, poem 332, will perfect its analogies by emptying him even of
     the will to shock.
    Language in the
Canzoniere
naturally departs from itself, beginning with the lover’s falling away from innocence
     in poem 2 and leading eventually deep into the matrix of self. Petrarch’s peculiar
     genius reveals itself in the way he is able to make his waywardness relevant, to seize
     on the word or metaphor that will test Hugh of St. Victor’s principle that although
     physical or moral particulars may be absurd or different from one another (
fuoco/fire
and
ghiaccio/ice,
or
onestate/chastity
and
leggiadrial
charm), on some level of understanding they are held in tension. Both intestinal
     and moral pain, as well as the sensation of love, oscillate between freezing and burning,
     holding the person to the test of the body. An appearance of virtue may cover a multitude
     of common, ordinary sins, and charm may be a veneer over the most cruel and base nature—may
     even coexist with it in apparent harmony. (Petrarch found in Cicero’s letters to Atticus,
     discovered by him in 1345, unnerving discrepancies between the public and the private
     man that forced him to reassess his early high opinion of Cicero.) Cicero had demonstrated
     the manner in which
honestum
and
utile
were necessarily linked attributes of the public man, not opposed as they might seem
     to be. A person with power over others covered up the inconvenient realities in order
     to function honorably. The poet, however, could not embrace the lie; his duty was
     to reveal truth even at the expense of his credibility.
    Petrarch may originally have acquired his license to simultaneously reveal and conceal
     human nature (articulated in poem 5) from Cicero’s definition of etymology: that the
     attributes and etymologies of Laura’s name are synonymous. In other words, the varied
     outgrowth of forms (
Laureta/Lzaretta, l’aura
/breeze,
laurea/laurel
wreath,
laureto/laurel
grove,
l’auro/gold, l’aureo/highly
praised,
l’aurora/
’dawn, l’òra/hour) and the roots of
laur, lavr,
and
labr,
are all pertinent to his theme. They function as recurring butambiguous factors to be explored along with the nature of her idealized qualities,
     virtues that will have to be tested through the power of her contrasting effects (to
     freeze fire and to burn snow, to bind and to loosen, to harden and to melt) in multiple
     ways throughout the
Canzoniere.
But because many of the ingredients of this mix are evanescent or working at evident
     cross-purposes, they do not coalesce into belief; instead they are held in abeyance
     until the very end of the work as if the poet were waiting for some external force
     to materialize by which they might all gain definition.
    What Petrarch does with the word
ira
(anger) serves as a good example. As a motivating factor in the
Canzoniere,
anger could not be more important since it combines with his love in a potent mix
     vented often as “useless tears” but on some memorable occasions as overt or covert
     attacks on his enemies. However, the
ira
that Petrarch inherited from the Provençal departed from the wrathful, sometimes
     purifying emotion in Latin to veer into ambiguity, to that feeling aroused in the
     poet by a lady who disdains him, namely, a feeling of “distress” or “sadness” close
     to sloth (
acedia).
Petrarch restores
ira
to its Latin sense by making it the centerpiece of his Babylon sonnets, poems 136-138.
     True, he is obliged to atone for having lost his temper; a series of poems will eventually
     follow in which