Petrarch by Mark Musa Page B

he and Laura share a disabling kind of rage, climaxing with poem 232
     in which it becomes clear that he experiences the Latin sense while acknowledging
     its limitations as a virtue: when anger arises from righteous indignation with inhuman
     conditions, Petrarch implies, it has its uses (Dante said the same in the
Inferno),
but as distress and sadness or destructive rage, it can be a vice. He does not completely
     overcome it, in spite of what he says in poem 232. Anger to be used for polemical
     purposes simmers just under the surface until late in the work, when in poem 356 he
     providentially turns it on himself to cure himself of it once and for all.
    Petrarch obviously meant to use some of the language of the long sonnet cycles as
     a vermifuge, “a
pharmakon
to be expelled with the other contaminants of his being,” as St. Augustine does in
     the
Confessiones
(see Vance, p. 13). Yet what he does with words in the
Canzoniere,
however crudely, always teaches. In poem 360, Love accuses the poet before the Court
     of Justice of having sold “little words, or rather lies” when he might have been aiming
     for the highest goal, suggesting that he has been deceiving his readers deliberately.
     But the writing process, like loving, has its seductive as well as rough and polished
     operations; it tends to lead one astray. It becomes clear long before that late canzone
     that these deceptive words were meant to act as signals, as small torches lighting
     the poet’s way through the by-ways of thought. Always look for the light within the
     individual word, he had learned from Virgil, somewhere under the poetic cloud. A word
     that is penetrated may yield another life, almost a mythology in itself that might
     distract from or serve his essential purpose. Some come to mind:
vendetta, sasso, scoglio, petra, fascio, scaltrire, elicere, scolpire, folcire, scevro,
     rappellare, smalto, verga, verace, vena, onore, pena, puro, purpureo, podere;
the ubiquitous
castità, onestà, ghiaccio, laccio, fuoco, leggiadria, esca,
and
albergo.
For example, the
scaltire
(to polish, to make witty or sophisticated) of 125.26 sums up in a word what he has
     chosen to avoid doing in the first part of the canzone; but the word also contains
     an oblique sense of interiority, inferiority, or deception. Since it allows for more
     than one meaning, it serves as a code word. A more subtle line of thought emerges
     from turning inward instead of proceeding directly to the right in the text. There
     is a metaphoric fabric which he weaves very early; all the old familiar terms of love
     provide the groundwork against which he superimposes his figures. These take shape
     out of the unusual or uniqueterms Petrarch uses to suggest, in their etymologies, the gist of a new line of argument.
     The verb form
merco
in 212.13, for example (from
mercare,
to buy), is one of a number of one-time-only terms that flicker with light under
     the poetic cloud of apparent meaning demanding to be examined. Yielding several lines
     of thought branching from its Latin root (one connecting with the
vendetta
of poem 2) the word can be read deeply not only in its literal and moral senses but
     in a rhetorical one as well. He invites us to consider by signaling with this word
     a theme he pursues until late in the collection, the economics of love. According
     to this science, the poet’s falling in love involves a transaction. The lover offers
     his or her emotional and rational life to the beloved as a pledge in the hope that
     love will be reciprocated or, second best, that it will offer some measure of glory
     and fame for suffering. But a deeper wish motivates the religious poet, and that is
     to redeem a measure of faith in faith itself by loving her on into death, making an
     imaginative assault on the great metaphor of a reality “beyond.” Like Derrida’s “metaphor
     of metaphor” outside philosophical language by which that language is made to fall
     short, the