Reading Petrarch at (almost) 40
Love at first sight?
The Book:
The Poetry of Petrarch
Translated and with an introduction by David Young
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2004
The Talk:
In her book Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World historian Patricia Crone describes romantic love before the pre-industrial era:
Romantic love was if anything even more romantic than today, a mere glimpse of another person being enough to kindle it, or even a picture or a dream: love at first sight seems to have flourished in direct proportion to the degree of segregation between the sexes.
I think of Miranda in The Tempest, when she sees a young man for the first time in her life and exclaims: “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!”
On the darker side, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses many of the stories follow a pattern in which a god is enflamed with insatiable lust at first gaze upon a particular human.
Crone goes on to explain that romantic love was not grounds for marriage, but rather “a kind of madness” since marriages were the way family property was passed on and everyone in a family had a stake in that process. (In Shakespeare, again, romantic passion is portrayed as a kind of insanity—in contrast to our times in which the absence of romance is considered a problem to be solved.)
Key thought: Romantic love used to be different. As Dickens writes of the deadness of Marley in the opening to A Christmas Carol: “This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”
“The one thing perfect in her time”
The Canzoniere (“Songbook”) is a collection of 366 poems that Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) wrote and edited over the course of his life. Most of the poems are sonnets, and most of them are about Laura, a married woman that Petrarch fell in love with at first sight. (Petrarch was unmarried, due to his position in the Church.) His fixation on Laura would last the rest of his life.
The day, the month, the year, oh, bless them all,
the season and the time, the hour and moment,
the gorgeous countryside, the very spot
where two eyes struck me first and bound me fast
These poems were published (or at least publicly circulated) around the time of their writing. The poems often mention the embarrassment of the whole world knowing about his love for Laura. However, it doesn’t seem to have harmed Petrarch’s reputation much or his ecclesiastical career. (It was, apparently, a different time.)
Laura, for her part, never showed any interest in Petrarch. By Petrarch’s own account, she was steadfastly indifferent to him, coolly polite, tolerant, perhaps occasionally annoyed. The poems suggest that they only interacted maybe a handful of times, and then only very briefly. And yet Petrarch replayed these brief interactions over and over in his mind for decades.
And if I see the wind
stirring the white and yellow meadow flowers
I think about the place
where that first day I saw that golden hair
disheveled in the wind as I caught fire.
David Young’s 2004 translation of the Canzoniere does not attempt to match the rhyme schemes of the original Italian but rather its flow and meaning. There’s lots of indirect rhyme and musicality, but the poems keep moving along smoothly, gracefully.
A couple years ago I read David Young’s translation of Du Fu, and that book lingered in my mind for a very long time. It’s the kind of book you want to spend a lifetime with. (My write-up is here.) So when I saw Young’s translation of Petrarch at the library it was an instant-read for me. I’m so glad I read it.
Love / Time
Life is a story. But it’s also a string of moments. Moments of bliss, moments of misery. Moments of confidence, moments of uncertainty. Moments of belonging, moments of isolation.
You have a moment of fulfillment—and then a day, a week, month, year passes, and you’re on to something completely different.
You find yourself in unspeakable pain—and then the following week you struggle to imagine how that pain actually felt.
You achieve everything you wanted. And then there’s tomorrow. And tomorrow after that. And tomorrow after that. The story reaches its climax, but then time keeps going. Life adds up… but there’s always a remainder.
In psychology, they talk about the experiencing self and the reflective self. One self is going through the emotional moment, while the other is evaluating the whole sweep of life—past, present, future.
The Canzoniere gives the reader this double perspective. As the sequence goes on, the reader can feel the subtle changes. Certain images become dominant for a time then fade. Certain moods repeat over years. Petrarch’s record keeping of anniversaries—it’s been seven years… It’s been ten years… It’s been fifteen years…—invites us to read this “songbook” as a lifelong diary of love.
In 1327, at precisely
the day’s first hour, April 6, I entered
this labyrinth, and I’ve found no escape.
And so, as Young points out in his introduction, the Canzoniere is as much about time as it is about love. Love over time. And, thus, it’s also about the self through time: What changes, what doesn’t change.
and these new tears, shed for these old desires,
prove that I’m still the thing I used to be,
a thousand things have changed, but I have not.
Our fond hopes will deceive us
About two thirds through the collection, there comes a turn. (Young notes in his introduction how this two-part asymmetry mimics the sonnet form.)
As Petrarch nears middle age, his love for Laura modulates into a softer, more friendly admiration. He wonders if perhaps they might now be able to have a platonic friendship as two fully matured adults. And then Laura dies (likely of the Black Death). Young notes that in the most authoritative manuscript there are seven blank pages here “apparently acknowledging Laura’s death.”
From this point on the love god, Cupid, who was so central in the first part, moves into the background, as Death steps into the light.
She sojourned in my heart, alive and fair,
like some high lady staying in a cottage;
now I’ve become, because she’s passed away,
mortal indeed, and dead, while she’s a goddess.
Death was always there in the early poems, but it becomes the more dominant figure in the second section. What begins as a record of youthful romantic madness and lyric virtuosity, deepens into a more serious, more complex, more profound series of mediations on fate, virtue, eternity, and mortality.
Undoubtedly, we’re merely dust and shadow;
undoubtedly, desire is blind and greedy;
undoubtedly, our fond hopes will deceive us.
I liked the first part of the book; I loved the second part. (But, of course, much of the gravity of the second part comes from “living” with Laura and Petrarch through twenty-one years of love poems prior.)
Petrarch’s hair grows white, his body weakens. He even feels, after Laura has died, that his talent for poetry is waning. His creative inspiration is running on fumes. For a while, Laura (“novice angel”) visits him in his dreams, where she chastely comforts him and scolds him for his tears. But after a while, the night visits cease, and Petrarch is left alone in a kind of living death.
My faithful mirror tells me very often,
as do my tired spirit, changing skin,
diminished strength, and slow agility:
”Don’t hide it from yourself now; you are old.”
The book wraps with a lengthy prayer to the Virgin Mary, in which Petrarch pleads for her to “close down my sorrows,” which she appears to grant since the book promptly ends. But we know that in real life Petrarch continued to live on 26 years after Laura’s death. The story ends with an implied death and heavenly ascent, but what we are really left with is the remainder. The story ends, but the days go on.
Halfway through the journey of our life
The experiencing self vs. the reflecting self. Which one is the real self? Is Petrarch the sonnet or the songbook? When the Canzoniere begins, Petrarch is clearly the sonnet—the fire-ice, war-peace, life-death, love-hate, light-dark, in the moment experience of struggle. But as the sonnets accrue, something changes, for the poet and the reader, ever so gradually. By the 366th poem, Petrarch is the accumulation, the aggregation, the composite.
This year I turn 40.
There’s a piece of advice someone gives you when you first become a parent: Everything is a phase. No matter what happens, wonderful, sad, exhilarating, or exhausting—it’s a phase.
When I look back now at my younger years, I read myself differently. What seemed like a philosophical crisis or a theological crisis or a creative crisis was a developmental crisis, at least by half. What I defined as “the human condition” was really just being 13 or 15 or 19 or 22. I thought they were everything, but they were just moments.
And yet reaching 40 feels different. The crisis is not in the moment anymore but in the aggregate, not in the making of a decision but in the sum of decisions already made.
The physiological stages to come are not the growing pains of mastering new abilities and capacities but just…pains.
The challenge of socializing myself into the world is more or less complete. I know old men. I know what comes next. The rest of the journey is a gradual de-socializing. With every passing year, I care less what people think, I have fewer social interactions, I receive less attention.
The general feeling is not only that life is surprisingly short but also that there are so many days in it. You build a house. You build a monument out of days. And now you’ve got all these leftover bricks, way more than you needed to get the job done. Now what are you going to do with the pile? I hadn’t thought that far.
Dante found himself in a dark wood at 35. Petrarch lost Laura at 38. I fear no man but that thing…
…it scares me.
The dark wood.
The remainder.
The story ends, but the days go on.
Related:
Dante's Inferno is a video game
The infinite field of Japanese poetry
7 ways Leonardo da Vinci wasn't a Renaissance man
Italy braces for record heatwave with red alerts in 22 cities (Euronews, 8/16/24)
“Italy has issued red alert warnings in 22 cities as the country braces itself for yet another intense heatwave in a summer that broke all previous records for extreme temperatures.”