Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance 9780300147285

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Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance

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GORDON BRADEN

Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham of the Class of 1917, Yale College. Copyright © 1999 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Postscript Sabon type by Keystone Typesetting, Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York Braden, Gordon, 1947Petrarchan love and the continental Renaissance : Gordon Braden. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-07621-5 (cloth : alk. paper) i. Love poetry, European — History and criticism. 2. European poetry — Renaissance, 1450-1600 —History and criticism. 3. Love poetry, Romance — History and criticism. 4. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374. Rime. 5. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374 —Influence. I. Title. PNii8i.B73 1999 8o9.i'93543 -dc2i 98-50952 CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

forEMH pretz & valor

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction

xi

A Note on Texts 1 Petrarch

i

2

Petrarchism

3

Plus Ultra Notes

xv

61 129

163

Name Index

195

vii

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Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time acquiring shape and detail. It began doing so in the classroom, and I am indebted to several generations of students, undergraduate and graduate, who helped me figure out what did and did not make sense. Many contributed more than that. Luis Gamez was an important guide in my first ventures into the comparatively uncharted territory of Hispanic Petrarchism; more recently Anne Mcllhaney has been indispensable in this regard (my last chapter would not exist without her). Donna Kimzey uncovered widely ignored dimensions to the history of Petrarchism; I have barely been able to set foot in the territory she opened up, but my knowledge of it gave me important assurance in some of the generalizations I venture here. Friends and colleagues at later stages have helped in various ways. Margie Burns and Anne Coldiron did important archival research on my behalf; David Quint answered a question that other scholars had left annoyingly unaddressed. David Mikics and John Rumrich supplied commissions that led to the shaping of a particularly difficult second chapter. William Kerrigan, Clare Kinney, G. W. Pigman, Alison Weber, and Theresa DiPasquale read substantial portions of the evolving manuscript and offered their suggestions; almost all of them I took. My longest, richest, and happiest conversation about Petrarch and his legacy has been with Elizabeth Hull; on virtually every page that follows I recognize its impress.

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Acknowledgments

The beginning of serious work on this book was greatly facilitated by the hospitality of the California Institute of Technology and (down the block and around the corner) the Huntington Library. The Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University (with its unrivalled Petrarch collections) and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin (repository of some important materials on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz) were generous with their resources. In these last days, Joyce Ippolito has been an adroit and patient copyeditor. I am grateful to Gail Wronsky for evidence that Petrarchism is not a dead letter for contemporary poetry, and for giving me her kind permission to quote it on p. 12.9.

Introduction

— There's things you can't get in books. — There are things you can't get anywhere. But we dream they can be found in other people. — Twin Peaks, Episode 2012.

I did not read Petrarch with any attendveness until I in effect had to. Coming in my early years of university employment to teach a survey course in English Renaissance literature, I realized I needed to know more, and it would probably be helpful for my students to know something, about the poems that were responsible for so many of the conspicuous and odd features of Renaissance love poetry. My education had left me with a sheaf of not very interesting generalizations about Petrarchism and an impression that the topic was a much studied one; that impression was of course true, but in the amplitude of secondary literature, I had trouble finding the book that would give me the satisfactory big picture. As it happens, my pedagogical responsibilities coincided almost exactly with the appearance of Robert Durling's momentous edition of the Canzoniere, which made an accurate English translation of the sequence available for the first time, in company with an Italian text on the facing page. My largely self-taught Italian began there, as my eyes kept shifting from the left-hand page to the right. Teaching the course with some regularity,

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xii

Introduction

I found myself reading through Petrarch's sequence many times; by stages, Petrarch became the focus of the entire course, and Durling's edition one of the textbooks (I like to think I played a modest role in keeping it in print). Both Petrarch's own poetry and the history of its imitation came to make more sense to me than I had expected they would, and two decades of teaching the subject this way have left me with an almost narrative sense of how one gets from the Canzoniere to Shakespeare's Sonnets while seeming to read versions of just about the same thing over and over again. For some years now — I had not thought it would take this long — I have been trying to write up what I saw. The result is not by any means the definitively inclusive book I would have wanted to find at the start, nor am I the person to write such a book. My coverage and interests are too eccentric for that, though the vastness and complexity of the material are such that possibly no one ever will write that book. I take some comfort in thinking that the closest thing to it, and still the most useful place to send someone for a sense of Petrarchism as a whole, is Leonard Forster's The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), which after an introductory overview bores in with intense scholarship on a series of specialized but resonant topics. What I have to offer is more continuous in its argumentation than Forster's book but is similarly more concerned with saying what it has to say than with being thorough. The demands of the material have nevertheless expanded my scope well beyond my original plans, and the current volume is the result of a largely pragmatic decision to split the task in two; I hope to finish the story in a complementary Petrarchan Love and the English Renaissance. The titular division is not rigorously observed. English writers show up here at several places, to illustrate a point or draw a perspective, while the last chapter ventures geographically (and to some extent culturally) outside the European continent into early American literature. On the other hand, some important elements of the continental tradition seemed to me most usefully discussed in connection with English materials, and I have postponed their their discussion until a later date. Despite the gaps, I have striven for an approach that might make the phenomenon of Petrarchism intelligible as a whole. Much of the specialized literature on the topic not only is fragmented nationally but tends to focus on the reactions of particular writers to a dominant tradition already in place; these reactions are often discussed as a kind of agonistic revolt against that heavy inheritance. Individually compelling, such readings are hard to string together into a larger sequence that makes much sense; seemingly decisive acts of radical revision somehow keep leaving the next writer back in more or less the same fix. Revolt plays its role in the history of the tradition from the very

Introduction

xiii

beginning (I honor more than some do Petrarch's rejection of his own enterprise in the final poems of his Canzoniere), but I have also tried to recapture what is, for perfectly good reasons, difficult for modern readers to recapture: a sense of the tradition as opportunity, a starting point that makes new action both possible and meaningful. Change is not necessarily rupture, and treating it as such can obscure its logic in unhelpful ways. If there is a polemical agenda in what follows, however, it is not a (mildly) unfashionable celebration of the continuities of artistic tradition, but a determination to seek the continuity of this tradition in what for want of a better term I will call its subject matter. I conceive of that subject matter in fairly ordinary terms: desire for someone you cannot have. Petrarch's Canzoniere is among other things the record of feeling such desire for thirty-one years; it became the great love story of the Renaissance. Why? Many other things are going on in Petrarchan poetry (and in the prose that falls under the same spell), and there are times when the human love story is no more than the vehicle of a grander metaphor. My discussion, however, will continually return to this vehicle — as does the tradition itself. I do not think we have come to terms with the tradition until we have come to terms with this underlying story, a story in which nothing happens. I suspect that some of my ways of exploring that story (particularly the forays into biographical lore and the repeated concern with the question that H.-I. Marrou has half-jokingly entitled utrum copularentur) may strike some readers as naive, rude, or (to give me the benefit of the doubt) willfully unsophisticated. My own feeling is that it is in fact a general inhibition or embarrassment before the ordinariness of the subject matter of most lyric poetry — especially love poetry — that makes criticism of such poetry so inadequate, indeed sometimes leads to the conviction that we honor such poetry best when we say it transcends its subject matter, or perhaps does not even have one. That is not a conviction I share or aspire to. Combining a respect for the ordinary with a similar respect for efforts to make or see it as something more elite may generate a logical paradox of sorts but not, I think, an experiential one; people do it all the time, often quite skillfully. Occasional drops in my stylistic register (including a few citations from modern popular culture) are meant not as ironic counterpoint but as a way of keeping things on track. My business here is for the most part with the primary texts. Citations of secondary literature are comparatively light except on a few specific topics. Some readers may miss more of a sense of engagement with recent criticism, but that would have meant writing a different book. Two particularly prominent trends dominate the present landscape, at least in English-language criticism. One is a particularly intense interest in the political content of Petrarchan love poetry;

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Introduction

this content is most clearly operative in English Petrarchism, and for the most part I prefer to discuss it in that context, though the matter does come up here in my last chapter. The other trend, feminist scrutiny of the gender politics of Petrarchism, is of considerable relevance to the present volume. Some of the formulations produced by that scrutiny now seem to me hasty and in need of further squaring with the record, but that is because the record of female participation in the tradition has proved, now that we are actually looking at it, to be so rich and compelling. It was not in my original plan to have as much to say about female Petrarchists as I do; as it has happened, they now occupy almost completely the last third of the book. I hope the Tightness of their doing so will seem as clear to the reader as it now does to me.

A Note on Texts

Quotations from Petrarch's Canzoniere are taken from Petrarch's Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); I make occasional adjustments in Durling's translation. For Petrarch's other poems I have used Triumphi, ed. Marco Ariani (Milan: Mursia, 1988), Rime Disperse, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Barber (New York: Garland, 1991), and Poesie latine, ed. Guido Martellotti and Enrico Bianchi (Turin: Einaudi, 1976). I quote Petrarch's two major collections of letters in the translations overseen by Aldo S. Bernardo: Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum Familiarum Libri, 3 vols. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975; and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981-85), and Letters of Old Age: Rerum Senilium Libri, 2. vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Quotations of Shakespeare are from The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition, gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986); line numbers for plays refer to this edition. Unattributed translations throughout are either my own or, in the case of many of the Spanish texts, done in collaboration with Anne Mcllhaney.

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Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance

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I

Petrarch

In the vestibule of hell, amid those who lived without praise or blame, together with the cattivo coro of angels who were neither rebellious nor faithful, Dante recognizes "!' ombra di colui / che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto": the shade of him who from cowardice made the great refusal (Inferno 3.5960).l Following his guide's instructions, Dante gives no name: Fama di loro il mondo esser non lassa; misericordia e giustizia li sdegna: non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa. (49-51) The world does not suffer that report of them shall live. Mercy and justice disdain them. Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass on. Commentary, however, has identified the shade as Pietro da Morrone, the aged hermit who was elected Celestine V in 1294 by a papal conclave that did not trust any of its own number. The gran rifiuto was Celestine's abdication five months later. That act allowed the election of Cardinal Caetani as Boniface VIII; the new pope's unsurprising interference in Florentine affairs helped spark the troubles that led to Dante's exile in 1302. Celestine was in a position to oppose the malevolent politics that so often issued from Rome; for failing to do so, Dante groups him with those who might as well not have lived: "Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi" (64).

I

2

Petrarch

That is not the only judgment, not even the usual judgment on Celestine, who was canonized in 1313 —one of the last popes to be designated a saint. Benvenuto da Imola specifically disputed the traditional identification of the anonymous shade because Celestine did not abdicate "ex uilitate" but "ex magnanimitate."2 His argument appears to reflect a growing consensus, voiced a few decades earlier by Petrarch, who affirms that Celestine's abdication had secured precisely the commemoration that Dante sought to deny him: his "present renown [praesens fama] and consecrated name give countenance to his admirers and give the lie to his detractors" (Life of Solitude, p. 2.3 6).3 Petrarch seems to have Dante's text in mind, and treats it gingerly: "Let any one who chooses ascribe this action of the solitary and holy father to meanness of spirit [uilitati animi]., for it is permissible to have not only differing but opposite opinions on the same subject according to the variety of our minds" (p. 2.33). But Petrarch's counterjudgment is firm. Celestine was animated not by fear of his office but by scorn: "I regard it as the action of a mind highly exalted and emancipated, knowing no yoke and truly celestial, and so I feel that it could have been performed only by a man who estimated human things at their true value and trampled beneath his feet the proud head of fortune" (p. 23 3). He was not fleeing responsibility, but pursuing his true goals: "to despise the world and to love Christ and the things by which Christ is reached — virtue, peace, silence, solitude" (p. 2.34). The order of that catalogue is deliberate; Petrarch takes up Celestine's case as one of exemplary commitment to the uita solitaria, in his treatise on that subject, written in defense and praise of solitude as "something holy, innocent, incorruptible, and the purest of all human possessions" (p. 137). From this contrast of judgments on Celestine radiates a larger contrast between Dante and Petrarch, and between the ages they are often taken to represent. Petrarch's judgment, coinciding with the official position of the Church, is in a sense the more conservative, giving Celestine the benefit of the Middle Ages' traditional praise of religious hermitage; Dante's subjection of that withdrawal to the accountability of ordinary politics looks in this perspective distinctly more modern. Petrarch's admiration of monastic discipline was genuine, and it provides the thrust for his treatise De otio religioso, inspired by a visit to his brother Gherardo, recently become a Carthusian monk. But De uita solitaria, written at about the same time, advances what is on inspection a more innovative agenda. Evocations of the religious experience possible for the solitary— for instance, of feeling one's every action intimately witnessed by Christ (pp. 146-48) —are consistently bracketed by seemingly submissive irony ("what can I know or say about all these things, unhappy sinner that I am, dragging about with me the ball and chain of my iniquities?"

Petrarch

3

p. 148), to be replaced with benefits more ordinary — "these common things" — and more radical: "to live according to your pleasure, to go where you will, to stay where you will; in the spring to repose amid purple beds of flowers, in the autumn amid heaps of fallen leaves; to cheat the winter by basking in the sun and the summer by taking refuge in cool shades, and to feel the force of neither unless it is your choice [nisi qua uelis]\ To belong to yourself in all seasons and wherever you are to be ever with yourself, far from evil, far from examples of wickedness! Not to be driven along, not to be dashed aside, not to be tormented, not to be pressed, not to be dragged to a banquet when you prefer not to eat, or to be forced to speak when you would rather be silent, not to be held up at crossings with importunate greetings and handshaking" (p. i49).4 Devotional purpose sanctions in a distant way the desire to escape the social claims of others, but the business at hand is to clear space for pleasures of purely personal willfulness. Petrarch is staking the secular territory for a new style of autarkic individualism. In so doing he gives us a version of the enterprise that Jacob Burckhardt put at the center of his concept of the Renaissance as a period — the abstraction of the individual from the available definitions of medieval society: "race, people, party, family, or corporation."5 Indeed, Petrarch wrote of himself as "singular da 1'altra genre" (Canzoniere ijz.i);6 it is easy to read his life records as the story "of a man less committed than most to a definite role in society, whether religious or secular, and more than usually free from domestic or civic responsibilities."7 Thomas Bergin is memorably specific: Petrarch "did not, as Dante for example did, actually take part in the administration of government, did not, for that matter, ever practice a profession or marry or fight a battle."8 At almost every turn Dante is more deeply rooted in the texture of the late medieval city-state; his greatest literary achievement may have been possible only in the enforced leisure of his exile, but it was an exile he resented and always hoped could be revoked. The Commedia itself is an agency of that possibility: Se mai continga che '1 poema sacro al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra, si che m'ha fatto per molti anni macro, vinca la crudelta che fuor mi serra del bello ovile ov' io dormi' agnello, nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra; con altra voce omai, con altro vello ritornero poeta. (Paradiso 25.1-8) If ever it come to pass that the sacred poem to which heaven and earth have so set hand that it has made me lean for many years should overcome the cruelty

4

Petrarch which bars me from the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy to the wolves which war on it, with changed voice now and with changed fleece a poet will I return.

The imminence of the divine vision does not efface the longing and hope for civic vindication. The last poem in Petrarch's Canzoniere also recalls its author's Tuscan origins and testifies to the pain of deracination: Da poi ch'i' nacqui in su la riva d'Arno, cercando or questa et or quelPaltra parte, non e stata mia vita altro ch'affanno. (366.82-84) Since I was born on the bank of the Arno, searching in this and now this other direction, my life has been nothing but troubles.

But the reminiscence stops here. The earthly birthplace does not beckon as a place of rest; the poet looks only to heaven. Petrarch's patriotic allegiance would have been weak from the start. His father was exiled from Florence nine months after Dante was and took refuge in Arezzo, the city whose subservience to Florence was secured by the battle in which Dante fought. There Francesco was, in his own words, conceived and born in exile ("in exilio genitus, in exilio natus"; Familiares i.i), knowing as it were before birth the condition to which Dante came in midlife and sustaining it with what looks like conscious deliberation and even pride: "nullaque iam tellus, nullus michi permanet aer; / incola ceu nusquam, sic sum peregrinus ubique" (Epistolae metricae 3.19.15-16; I have now no permanent land or sky; an inhabitant of no place, I am thus a pilgrim everywhere). Though he did call Florence his patria, he first visited the city in 1350, and only briefly; he later declined a professorship and a canonry that would have made it convenient for him to settle there. The closest thing to a permanent residence that he ever had was the isolated house in the Vaucluse, the setting and inspiration for De uita solitaria; but after sixteen years, in 13 53, he abandoned even this fixity for twenty years of movement among various sites in northern Italy. A wariness about employment accompanied him throughout. His early attendance at law school in Bologna — his father's idea — came to nothing of professional consequence. He took minor orders in the Church and received income from several benefices, but he was never an ordained priest and avoided any appointment that even theoretically involved the cure of souls. In his own version of ilgran rifiuto, he more than once declined offers of a bishopric and the visible and influential post of apostolic secretary ("I would rather be poor than upset"; Familiares

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5

y.6).9 On occasion, he served as the diplomatic representative of various powers, but these were ad hoc missions, with no standing commitment. The most important ongoing obligation that he accepted was to provide — partly firsthand, primarily through others — for the upbringing of a daughter and a son. Their mother or mothers are attested almost exclusively by the existence of the children;10 only in old age, when he was cared for by his daughter and her husband, was the context of Petrarch's adult life in the usual sense of the word domestic. This impression of a life lived in the interstices of the medieval social fabric is substantiated by the first-person passages in De uita solitaria. The author is one "whom neither sweetheart nor wife, neither bond nor interest nor guardianship nor chance of profit, neither the rostrum nor the bath, neither the tavern nor the banquet nor the public square could tie down to the city" (p. 135). When that world nevertheless manages to hem him in, his great strength is a capacity for intimate resistance: "When some need compels me to dwell in the city, I have learned to create a solitude among people and a haven of refuge in the midst of a tempest, using a device, not generally known, of so controlling the senses that they do not perceive what they perceive" (p. 135). By this artificium non omnibus notum, "in the midst of the turmoil of cities I create for myself in thought, as far as I may, an imaginary solitude in some retreat and by an effort of the mind triumph over my situation [uincens ingenio fortunam]" (p. 137). It is, among other things, to this tuning fork that Celestine's example resonates: "On the highest peak of the world and in the stately chamber of the pope, he lived meditating on his narrow, eremitic cave . . . solitary amid the throng [inter turbas solitarius}" (p. 234). Alienation so managed is the talent and resource of a new style of anomic independence; the voice that Petrarch gives it is an important part of his bequest to the Renaissance. We could, in a Burckhardtian spirit, gloss Petrarch's choice of life with Giovanni Pico's creation myth, by which the first man, conceived and born in exile from the chain of being, gains the power of absolute self-fashioning: " 'We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire.'... O great and wonderful happiness of man! It is given him to have that which he chooses and to be that which he wills [id esse quod uelit]."11 The rhetoric here can be paralleled in Petrarch's work. But at least one other important term intervenes between Petrarch and the myth of radical self-formation; in his own understanding the principal intent behind his avoidance of customary responsibilities was not an abstract notion of personal freedom but the exemplary pursuit of a profession with venerable ancestry but degraded standing in

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Petrarch

fourteenth-century Europe: the profession of letters. Petrarch is quite clear in De uita solitaria that the otium that most concerns him is leisure devoted to and animated by literature: "Isolation without literature is exile, prison, and torture; supply literature, and it becomes your country, freedom, and delight" (p. 131). After gesturing toward the spiritual freedom that solitude makes possible ("sometimes to rise, with thoughts that are lifted above yourself, to the ethereal region"; p. 150), he specifies its "more obvious pleasures [notiora\" as the strenuous program of study that eventually defines Renaissance humanism: "to devote oneself to reading and writing, alternately finding employment and relief in each, to read what our forerunners have written and to write what later generations may wish to read, to pay posterity the debt which we cannot pay to the dead for the gift of their writings" (p. 151). This is what Petrarch was doing with the time won and shielded from other demands. The precipitate of this enterprise is an immense literary oeuvre for which there is still no collected edition. The sheer amount of scribal work involved in its service drove Petrarch's favorite copyist, Giovanni Malpaghini, to flee in what sounds like a state of professional exhaustion: "I cannot write any more ... my enthusiasm for writing has not only cooled down but frozen stiff; now there is nothing that can induce me to write.... Never ... shall I write again, by Jove, for you or for anyone in the world" (Seniles 5.5; Petrarch refused to believe that this could be the real reason). It seems to be to Giovanni's departure that we owe the existence of a largely authorial autograph of the Canzoniere, though it is also clear that Petrarch was already handling much of the daily load himself; he apologizes to Boccaccio at one point for sending two letters in what he is sure would be recognized as somebody else's handwriting (Seniles 5.1). The very activity of writing provided him a sense of almost primal nurturance: "Incredible as it may seem, I desire to write but I know not about what or to whom to write. Nevertheless, like an unyielding passion, paper, pen, ink, and nightly vigils are more pleasing to me than sleep and repose. What more can I say? Except when writing, I am always tormented and sluggish, whence (strangely enough) I feel belabored while at rest and rested while at labor. When my heart, so hard that you may think it born from the stones of Deucalion, is totally immersed in parchment and wearies my fingers and eyes, it feels no cold or heat; then does it seem covered by the softest blanket, and fearing to be uncovered it clings to my limbs though they refuse to obey" (Familiares 13.7). Most of Petrarch's important human contacts were sustained through writing, in the immense correspondence that he preserved and revised; graphological references suffuse his work, to a degree noteworthy even for the bookish Middle Ages,12 and turn up in the most intimate contexts:

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et come vero prigioniero afflitto de le catene mie gran parte porto, e '1 cor negli ocelli et ne la fronte 6 scritto. (Canzoniere 76.9-11) and like a true suffering prisoner I carry a large part of my chains, and my heart is inscribed in my eyes and on my brow. Writing sometimes seems the very medium of Petrarch's affective life. It was certainly the medium for a fierce sense of individuation. He had a strong and possessive feeling of authorship, and could be angry with friends if they had trouble distinguishing his writing from others'. Misattributions in both directions distressed him: "I have nothing from anyone else, no one has anything from me — such, as I see it, is my hope. Let no one, then, steal what is mine, let no one foist upon me either what is his or another's — this I beg" (Seniles 2.4).13 His stiffness on this point is linked to the one form of social ambition that he did conspicuously feel. Petrarch's general avoidance of the usual forms of public recognition and prestige sets off the acknowledgment to which he did aspire, and that was indeed the focus of his extraordinary renown: his striving for the fame of literary achievement. A sizeable proportion of Petrarch's energy and intelligence was devoted to reestablishing the possibility of such fame, an effort that involved not just good writing but also a struggle to insert the profession of letters — secular and (in potential, at least) free-standing — into the available grid of publicly respectable vocations. The records of classical antiquity seemed to offer the model for such a profession, and it is for this testimony as much as anything else that Petrarch so valued them. Antiquity provided him as well with the resonant symbol that gave focus and direction to this momentous enterprise: the crown of laurel. Petrarch's determined pursuit of literary otium is inseparable from one spectacularly public moment, his laureation on the Capitoline in Rome in April of i34i. 14 The idea of such a ceremony had been in the air in the early trecento. Albertino Mussato was crowned in his native Padua in 1315. Dante begins the Paradiso with an appeal to Apollo that he prove worthy of the laurel and so stir others to the same enterprise (1.13-30). Yet he was never thus honored during his lifetime. He had been offered coronation at Bologna, but declined; it was not a thing to be done in exile, but conceivable only as part of his always imaginable return home: con altra voce omai, con altro vello ritornero poeta, e in sul fonte del mio battesmo prendero '1 cappello; pero che ne la fede, che fa conte Panime a Dio, quivi intra' io. (Paradiso 25.7-11)

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Petrarch

with changed voice now and with changed fleece a poet will I return, and at the font of my baptism will I take the crown; because there I entered into the Faith that makes souls known to God. For Petrarch, Florence scarcely figures at all. Exercising his own option, he chooses to be crowned in a city that he had visited only once before but whose abstract significance for him was immense, and in the speech he makes there he identifies Rome as his patria and elaborates on that more distant sense of rootedness to produce humanism's first manifesto — by some reckonings the beginning of the Renaissance: "The honor of the Republic stirs my heart when I recall that in this very city of Rome — the capital of the world, as Cicero calls it — in this very Roman Capitol where we now are gathered, so many and such great poets, having attained to the highest and most illustrious mastery of their art, have received the laurel crown they had deserved, but that now this custom seems rather to have been lost than to have been merely laid aside, and not lost merely, but reduced to a matter of strange legendry, and discontinued for more than twelve hundred years. For we do not read that anyone has been decorated with this honor since the illustrious poet Statius, who flourished in the time of Domitian. I am moved also by the hope that, if God wills, I may renew in the now aged Republic a beauteous custom of its flourishing youth" (p. 304).15 The aspiration to end a long cultural decay by giving new birth to the civilization of classical antiquity is the epochal concept contained in the very term Renaissance. But the posture is also Burckhardtian: this act of civic piety and deference to the past is simultaneously an act of extravagant egotism, propelling its achievement with a first-person pronoun. In the official fiction Petrarch's crown was awarded him by the Senate and People of Rome, upon recommendation of King Robert of Naples, but the whole process was to some extent clearly Petrarch's own idea and proceeded more or less according to his own script. (The Priuilegium that he received is very closely related in spots to the coronation oration.) His classical learning gave him both the right and the ability to crown himself. Petrarch's personal impress on the tradition he is reviving is visible at a number of points, including his choice of foliage.16 A crown of bay leaves —cut in the vale of Tempe, by a boy whose parents were still living — was the award for the victor in the poetic contest that was the origin of the Pythian games in ancient Greece. The association of the laurel wreath with poetic achievement—Apollo's art —persisted throughout antiquity. Other leaves, however, were also used for honoring poets — oak (the crown in the Capitoline contest to which Petrarch refers), myrtle, ivy —and some Renaissance symbolism draws on this wider, looser field of reference. Mussato, for instance, is crowned with a

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mixture of laurel, myrtle, and ivy, a combination that recurs in the opening lines of Lycidas. Petrarch alludes in his oration to this tradition (p. 3O9),17 but only to pass on quickly to the laurel, the otherwise exclusive object of his attention. The last quarter of his speech is a gloss on its specific properties. He gives emphasis to a symbolic convergence that is barely noted in previous commentary but in the Renaissance goes a fair way toward securing the laurel's special preeminence. In Rome, bay leaves were also used to crown victorious generals and their troops when they celebrated their triumph, and the laurel crown becomes an inclusive symbol of imperial success. Classical writers themselves are slow to articulate a connection between laureate poetry and laureate warfare. None is drawn in the pages that the elder Pliny devotes to the laurel and its uses (Natural History 15.12.5-38). Ovid, in telling the story of Daphne, has Apollo touch on both the artistic and the political traditions but does not superimpose them: semper habebunt te coma, te citharae, te nostrae, laure, pharetrae. tu ducibus Latiis aderis, cum laeta triumphum uox canet et uisent longas Capitolia pompas. (Metamorphoses 1.558-61) my hair, my lyre, my quiver will always hold you, laurel; you will be with the Latin generals when the happy voice sings the triumph and the Capitoline sees the long parade. A century later, Statius makes the plant's joint symbolism a topic in his praise of Domitian, whose Neronian artistic ambitions figured prominently in his own psychopathology: At tu, quern longe primum stupet Itala uirtus Graiaque, cui geminae florent uatumque ducumque certatim laurus ... (Achilleid 1.14-16) But you, whom Italian and Greek virtue hold in awe far above all others, for whom the twin laurels of poets and generals flower in competition ... Statius's text almost certainly prompts Dante's brief reference to laurels being gathered "per trinfare o cesare o poeta" (Paradiso 1.29), but only with Petrarch does the topic expand into an extended and emphatic thesis "de laurea tarn cesarea quam poetica."18 The last movement of the coronation oration begins by identifying the laurel crown as "the due reward of Caesars and of poets" (p. 309); and in his exposition of the symbolic and other attributes of the plant, Petrarch recurs to that parallel no fewer than four times, with Statius's lines as the clinching evidence. Scipio and Ennius discuss the matter in the Africa:

io

Petrarch que sint permissa poetis, famoseque rei certos agnoscere fines te liceat monstrante michi: quid laurea signet tarn ducibus claris quam uatibus addita sacris. (9.70-73 )19 let me learn, with your instruction, what things are permitted to poets, and the ends set for glorious action: what the laurel means, bestowed upon famous generals as well as sacred bards.

It is not only the echo of Statius's wording that is anachronistic; however long the equation may have hovered as something almost obvious, its firm formulation is a distinctly Petrarchan signature. Made the focus of this kind of attention, the topic becomes rich with possible meanings. As a matter of cultural politics, the alignment of Caesar and poet is a way of bestowing on literature some of the cachet that the Roman Empire, even as a ghostly memory, is still capable of generating; indeed, in one of its dimensions the Renaissance as a period is defined precisely by the pursuit of that cachet. More gravely, the double function of the laurel encapsules the topic that Curtius traces from Vergil, of the desired convergence of fortitude and sapiential This desideratum in rulers becomes a possibility for individuals as well, enabling the conquest of what George Chapman will call "the mind's empire"; the metaphor settles deep into the humanist program as an inclusive style of self-management: this is Learning: To have skill to throwe Reignes on your bodies powres, that nothing knowe; And fill the soules powers, so with act, and art, That she can curbe the bodies angrie part; All perturbations; all affects that stray From their one object; which is to obay Her Soveraigne Empire. (Chapman, Euthymiae raptus 504-10)

Petrarch's topos eventually germinates into claims of offhanded extravagance: Soul of my Muse! what active unknown fire Already doth thy Delphick wreath inspire? O'th sudden, how my faculties swell high, And I am all a powerful Prophesie. Sleep ye dull Caesars, Rome will boast in vain Your glorious Tryumphs, One is in my brain, Great as all yours, and circled with thy Bayes, My thoughts take Empire o're all land and seas. (James Shirley, "To L. for a Wreath of Bayes Sent" 1-8)

The principal point on Petrarch's mind in his oration is a simpler one. The analogy between Caesars and poets pivots not on similarity of activity but on

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identity of goals: "the fragrance of good repute [odor bone fame]": "As we consist of both body and spirit, two ways of seeking glory are set before us, namely the way of the body and the way of the spirit — though in this life each needs the help of the other. Nor is there any doubt that Caesars strive toward glory by the first of these two ways, and poets by the second. So then, since both Caesars and poets move toward the same goal, though by different paths, it is fitting that one and the same reward be prepared for both, namely, a wreath from a fragrant tree, symbolizing the fragrance of good fame and of glory" (p. 309). The major business of the oration is a defense of just this motivation; Petrarch is conscious of having to do battle against an august tradition of moral commentary: "Let this one truth suffice: that the desire for glory is innate not merely in the generality of men but in greatest measure in those who are of some wisdom and some excellence. Hence it is that although many philosophers have much to say in contempt of glory, few or none can be found who really condemn it. Which is shown most clearly by the fact that 'they have inscribed their names at the beginning of the very works they have written in contempt of glory,' as Cicero says in the first book of the Tusculans [1.34]" (p. 305). Cicero writes as a politician, a veteran of the cursus honomm, with a professional's eye for the maneuverings of his colleagues. Petrarch, momentarily unprivate, takes on the knowingness of that world, with its sense of the centrality of public regard in the shaping of individual action. Contrary voices are, however, not far away, and the non-anonymous pagan philosophers against whom Cicero speaks are not the most urgent. One of Petrarch's own proof texts is startlingly shadowed. To justify both his appearance at Rome and his appetite for recognition (pp. 305, 306), Petrarch quotes Vergil — "uincet amor patriae, laudumque immensa cupido" (Aeneid 6.82.3; love of the fatherland will win out, and immense desire for praise) — but without citing context: Marcus Junius Brutus's execution of his own sons for treason, a famously Roman act with a long tradition of both impressing and troubling observers.21 Vergil himself prefixes the line with a somber reckoning of the cost of Brutus's political virtue: "infelix, utcumque ferent ea facta minores" (822.; unhappy, however posterity receives these deeds). Vergil, according to Augustine, records the praise with a "shudder of compassion [clementer exhorruit]" (City of God $.i6).22 Augustine returns to Vergil's lines later (5.18) when he comes to the heart of his critique of Roman civic culture and the amor laudis that is its mainspring: "It was this greed for praise, this passion for glory [cupido gloriae], that gave rise to those marvellous achievements, which were, no doubt, praiseworthy and glorious in men's estimation" (5.12). But from a Christian perspective, the cult merely measures their poverty. "Those Roman heroes belonged to an earthly city, and the aim set before them, in all their acts of duty for her, was the safety of their country, and a

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kingdom not in heaven, but on earth; not in life eternal, but in the process where the dying pass away and are succeeded by those who will die in their turn. What else was there for them to love save glory? For, through glory, they desired to have a kind of life after death on the lips of those who praised them" (5.i4). We are in the presence of a key point on which the earthly city and the city of God are defined by contrast to one another. A Christian who hopes for true immortality must sternly curb the appetite for fame: "For this vice is an enemy to devout faith, if the greed for glory is stronger in the heart than the fear or the love of God; so much so, that the Lord said, 'How can you believe, when you look for glory from one another, and do not seek the glory which comes from God alone?' [John 12.43]" (5- z 4)- Augustine quotes from Cicero's Tusculans a text that might serve as a gloss for Petrarch's oration —"It is honor that nourishes the arts; it is glory that kindles men to intellectual effort [studia}" (i.4) 23 —but he does so to label it "this pernicious doctrine [pestis]" (5.13). Petrarch is setting himself not just against philistine lassitude but against one of the founding conceptions of medieval Christianity — under whose reign quite a few important writers did not in fact sign what they wrote. Yet if Petrarch is desirous of reentering the ciuitas terrena that Augustine sought to leave behind, it is an earthly city with only the most tenuous kind of corporeal existence. The Rome in which Petrarch was crowned was not much more than a decayed tourist attraction, "a kind of sketch and death-mask of ancient Rome" (Seniles 10.2.), its civic structure shrunk to two vestigial senators. The more metaphorical republic of letters in which he hoped to make his home was not a present reality but something that the ceremony itself was supposed to help bring into existence. That, after all, was why Petrarch had to help draft his own examination and diploma; part of the symbolic intent of the occasion was precisely to summon into existence an audience worthy to praise Petrarch's talent knowledgeably and appropriately. Among the attributes of the laurel that he cites is its ability to "make dreams come true" (p. 311) — and not the least dream at issue is the prospect of such an audience. Humanism is among other things a movement meant to bring that dream about, and it may be said in important ways to have succeeded; at a later date, Petrarch's theatrics of self-promotion would have seemed both less dramatic and less necessary. (The ceremony itself quickly declined in significance. The German emperors adopted it into their repertoire — they were still crowning writers as late as 1804 —and numerous universities took it up as well, but post-Petrarchan laureates are so numerous and obscure that they have never been catalogued.) Yet the futurity of Petrarch's orientation shows signs of being rooted in something deeper than historical contingency. In a letter placed

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near the start of his Familiares, he insists with some vehemence and rigor that a writer's proper audience is one that does not yet exist: "While any of your contemporaries survive, you will not fully enjoy what recognition you seek; when a grave encloses all of them, there will come those who judge you without hatred and without envy. Therefore let the present age judge us as it will; if the judgment is just, let us accept it with equanimity; if it is unjust, since we cannot turn to others, let us appeal to the more equitable judges of posterity" (1.2,). Current society, even or perhaps especially current literary society, is too crowded, edgy, competitive, dominated by the spirit of inuidia: "Perpetual conversation is a most delicate activity: it is offended at the smallest provocation; and one's presence is always an enemy of glory [famae semper inimica praesentia est]." An exception is briefly allowed to the almost transcendental figure of Scipio ("Only of Africanus, I recall, could it be said that he was extraordinary through reputation but even more through his presence"),24 yet qualifications soon gather: "like other men, envy, despite his many virtues, he could not avoid." Fame's true court is convened only when such abrasions end: "You must first of all consider whose writings are being praised. Search for the authors: you will certainly find that they have been dead many years. Do you want yours to be praised also? Then you must die. Human favor begins with the death of a man; thus the end of life is the beginning of glory [uitae finis principium est gloriae]." The fame that counts is posthumous fame. Putting it that way exposes Petrarch with special clarity to Augustine's critique of the Romans: this laudis amor is not just a useful way of doing worldly business, but a bid for a wholly secular immortality, pathetic in the eyes of anyone who believes in another kind. Yet as a motivation, posthumous fame also carries the potential for that ascetic self-control that Augustine himself admired in the Romans, and for which he admits that they were properly rewarded with earthly power. The satisfaction of posterity's regard is a satisfaction that can structure a person's life even as by definition it is a satisfaction that he will never experience; those whose praise counts for him do not exist and cannot exist while he is alive to receive it. Few saints are so logically austere in their self-denial.25 We need not think that Petrarch applied these principles with total rigor, but the futurity of his orientation is frequently attested — at the far end of his collected correspondence was to be an epistle "Posteritati," that is, to us —and the effort to discipline his fretfulness about his contemporary reputation seems genuine enough within human limits. And the picture of a writer working for the praise of the imagined unborn does after all anneal some important tensions in Petrarch's career, allowing a kind of simultaneous solitude and sense of communal belonging. Holding others

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not at the fluctuating distance possible in contemporary social interaction but projecting them through the vanishing point of death, the writer perhaps experiences them as more intimately a part of himself than he could any actual living person. Promoting and exemplifying this image of the writer's vocation might in themselves have gained Petrarch his important place in European cultural history. But my account so far has been avoiding the most visible and enduring source of his fame: his part in what becomes the preeminent, endlessly imitated love story of the Renaissance. Only glancingly attested in his Latin works, it is the central, indeed obsessive, theme of the vernacular poetry that somewhat unpredictably proves his most vigorous legacy. From that vantage point, the central, tenacious fact of his life is his consuming, unending desire for one woman: Qual mio destin, qual forza o qual inganno mi riconduce disarmato al campo, la Ve sempre son vinto? et s'io ne scampo, meraviglia n'avro; s'i' moro, il danno. Danno non gia, ma pro: si dolci stanno nel mio cor le faville e '1 chiaro lampo che Pabbaglia et lo strugge, e'n ch'io m'avampo, et son gia ardendo nel vigesimo anno. (Canz. 2.2.1.1-8) What destiny of mine, what compulsion, or what deception brings me unarmed back to the field where I am always conquered? and if I escape from it, I shall marvel; if I die, the loss is mine. Not loss at all, but gain: so sweet in my heart are the sparks and the bright lightning that dazzle and torment it, and in which I take fire and am already burning for the twentieth year. The story began, he tells us, when he saw her at the church of Saint Clare in Avignon, at morning services during Holy Week, 6 April 132.7. He also records that she died exactly twenty-one years later, to the very day and hour — probably of the plague, then making its first appearance in Europe since antiquity. According to the poetry, death did not end her hold on him: Tennemi Amor anni ventuno ardendo lieto nel foco et nel duol pien di speme; poi che Madonna e '1 mio cor seco inseme saliro al Ciel, dieci altri anni piangendo. (Canz. 364.1-4) Love held me twenty-one years gladly burning in the fire and full of hope amid sorrow; since my lady, and my heart with her, rose to Heaven, ten more years of weeping.

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He goes so far as to affirm that any ambition for literary success was wholly submerged in the helpless emotional turmoil of this experience: Et certo ogni mio studio in quel tempo era pur di sfogare il doloroso core in qualche modo, non d'acquistar fama. Pianger cercai, non gia del pianto onore. (Canz. 2.93.9-12.) And certainly all my effort in that time was only to give vent to my sorrowing heart in some fashion, not to gain fame. I sought to weep, not to get honor from my weeping. Thinking of her, he forgets the laurel. Yet things are more complicated than that; indeed, it is those complications that define the uniqueness of Petrarch's poetic enterprise and of the love story that he has to tell, and distinguish his work from that of some formidable predecessors. The name by which he calls the object of his devotion of thirtyone years is, of course, Laura — differing in Italian by one letter from the word for laurel, as if it were simply the feminine form of that noun. The association of the two is repeatedly elaborated, to become the most important trope in the Canzoniere: Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro vidi piu biancha et piu fredda che neve non percossa dal sol molti et molt'anni; e '1 suo parlare e '1 bel viso et le chiome mi piacquen si ch'i' P6 dinanzi agli occhi ed avro sempre ov'io sia in poggio o 'n riva. (Canz. 30.1-6) A youthful lady under a green laurel I saw, whiter and colder than snow not touched by the sun many and many years, and her speech and her lovely face and her locks pleased me so that I have her before my eyes and shall always have wherever I am, on slope or shore. Within this particular poem, she is "duro lauro / ch'a i rami di diamante et d'or le chiome" (23-24; harsh laurel that has branches of diamond and golden locks) and "Pidolo mio scolpito in vivo lauro" (27; my idol carved in living laurel). Such weavings are second nature in the sequence, their metaphorical code taken essentially for granted. What does the equation of Laura and lauro imply? One might simply be a symbol for the other, and we indeed have Petrarch's own endorsement of a straightforwardly allegorical reading of the laureate courtships in his Bucolicum carmen: "The female friend of whom I say both [shepherds] are worthy is Fame, for which poets sing as lovers do for their female friends" (Familiares

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10.4). The dominance of tenor over vehicle is clearly signaled in the third eclogue, when the successful courting of a nymph named Dane (that is, Daphne) leads to a shepherd's coronation on a sacred hill but nothing resembling sexual favors. The vernacular lyrics have a denser weave; they are subject to the same kind of interpreting, though often with a suspicious and not altogether friendly tone. In another letter, Petrarch replies to a theory that can sound like an accusation; Giacomo Colonna, he writes, has asserted that: "I invented the splendid name of Laura so that it might be not only something for me to speak about but occasion to have others speak of me; that indeed there was no Laura on my mind except perhaps the poetic one for which I have aspired as is attested by my long and untiring studies. And finally you say that the truly live Laura by whose beauty I seem to be captured was completely invented, my poems fictitious and my sighs feigned" (Familiares 1.9). The addressee is one of Petrarch's closest friends, and it is significant that even he would not know for sure; subsequent scholarship has not settled the matter.26 Petrarch himself continues: "I wish indeed that you were joking about this particular subject, and that she indeed had been a fiction [simulatio] and not a madness [furor]." It is possible to read evasion in those words, but I take them as a simple, emphatic denial of Colonna's thesis. In the Secretum, Petrarch's harrowing dialogue of moral self-arraignment, the spirit of Augustine ("that other fiction of mine [simulatus ille mihi etiam]" as he puts it in the letter to Colonna) takes the Laura / lauro pun to reveal precisely the opposite debasement — that the high-minded pursuit of literary glory is merely a by-product of ordinary lust: "Who could sufficiently utter his indignation and amazement at this sign of a distempered mind, that, infatuated as much by the beauty of her name as of her person, you have with perfectly incredible silliness paid honor to anything that has the remotest connection with that name itself? Had you any liking for the laurel of empire or of poetry, it was forsooth because the name they bore was hers; and from this time onwards there is hardly a verse from your pen but in it you have made mention of the laurel, as if indeed you were a denizen of Peneus' stream, or some priest on Cirrha's Mount" (pp. 134-35).27 "I must own myself beaten," Petrarch replies, "for it appears all you have said is taken from the very heart of the book of experience" (p. 137). He admits elsewhere that the solitude he so carefully cultivated for his literary work did not in fact confer one of the benefits he claimed for it in De uita solitaria: escape from the allurements of women. That treatise is unyieldingly misogynistic: "the attraction of women, the more fascinating it is, the more dreadful and baleful, to say nothing of their dispositions, than which there is naught more fickle or more inimical to the love of repose" (p. 205). Like Marvell in "The Garden," Petrarch celebrates Eden before the arrival

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of Eve: "Alone [Adam] lived in peace and joy, with his companion in labor and much sorrow. Alone he had been immortal, as soon as he is joined with woman he becomes mortal" (pp. 195-96). In his letters, Petrarch describes his retreat to the Vaucluse as a therapeutic attempt, inspired by illustrious example, to cure himself of the distractions of sexual desire: "Hoping to alleviate in those shady places that youthful fire which raged within me for so many years . . . I often used to flee there during my youth as though to a secure fortress" (Familiares 8.3). Yet he managed only to make things worse: "Alas, how incautious I was! Those very remedies became destructive; for my burning cares accompanied me and the fact that there was absolutely no help against the raging fire in so solitary a place made me burn even more hopelessly." In context, Petrarch is, against his usual habits, trying to persuade a male friend, whom he calls Olimpio, to live with him — a strategy for drowning out those libidinous voices that sound more powerfully in solitude. One poem in the Canzoniere describes even more dramatically the panicky need to hide in the crowd from his own erotic thoughts: Ne pur il mio secreto e '1 mio riposo fuggo, ma piu me stesso e '1 mio pensero che seguendol talor levommi a volo; e '1 vulgo a me nemico et odioso (chi '1 penso mai?) per mio refugio chero, tal paura o di ritrovarmi solo. (Canz. 2.34.9-14) Nor do I flee only my hiding place and my rest, but even more myself and my thoughts that used to raise me in flight as I followed them; and I seek (whoever thought it?) the mob, inimical and hateful to me, as a refuge: so afraid am I of being alone. Yet the letter to Olimpio also affirms that the contamination of his pastoral retreat by sexual desire did not hinder his literary productiveness but in at least one genre made it possible: "The flames in my heart spread through my bones and filled those valleys and skies with a mournful, but, as some called it, pleasant tune. From all of this emerged those vernacular songs of my youthful labors which today I am ashamed of and repent, but are, as we have seen, most acceptable to those who are affected by the same disease." This is not what the monkish persona of De uita solitaria had in mind for literary otium, as the Rime sparse are not quite what the poet laureate had in mind as the basis of his literary fame; the defeat of both their expectations helps delineate the real character of Petrarch's talent and achievement. The picture in the letter is drawn from the poems themselves: "quasi in ogni valle / rimbombi il suon de' miei gravi sospiri, / ch'acquistan fede a la penosa vita" (Canz. 23.11-14-,

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Almost every valley echoes to the sound of my heavy sighs which prove how painful my life is). Time and again the scene of those poems is one of deliberately chosen solitude: Solo et pensoso i piu deserti campi vo mesurando a passi tardi et lend, et gli ocelli porto per fuggire intenti ove vestigio uman la rena stampi. (Canz. 35.1-4) Alone and filled with care, I go measuring the most deserted fields with steps delaying and slow, and I keep my eyes alert so as to flee from where any human footprint marks the sand. Within this solitude the voice of Eros makes itself heard, prompting the lover's own response: ma pur si aspre vie ne si selvagge cercar non so ch'Amor non venga sempre ragionando con meco, et io con lui. (3 5.12.-14) but still I cannot seek paths so harsh or so savage that Love does not always come along discoursing with me and I with him. These conversations have a dense yield; we come to sense that they are the means by which desire becomes the stuff of poetry. The process is most fully set out in one of his best known canzoni, where the landscape of solitude is from the very beginning a mental landscape: Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte mi guida Amor, ch'ogni segnato calle provo contrario a la tranquilla vita. (129.1-3) From thought to thought, from mountain to mountain Love guides me; for I find every trodden path to be contrary to a tranquil life. The characteristic activity within this terrain is what Petrarch describes as a kind of willed hallucination: Ove porge ombra un pino alto od un colle talor m'arresto, et pur nel primo sasso disegno co la mente il suo bel viso. (27-29) Where a tall pine or a hillside extends shade, there I sometimes stop, and in the first stone I see I portray her lovely face with my mind. In the Secretum, Augustine speaks scornfully of such visions as amantum infame priuilegium, the infamous privilege of lovers.28 Here the effort exposes itself to quick disillusion:

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Poi ch'a me torno, trovo il petto molle de la pietate; et alor dico: "Ahi lasso, dove se' giunto! et onde se' diviso!" (30-32.) When I come back to myself, I find my breast wet with pity and then I say: "Alas, where have you come to, from what are you separated?" Yet the very reminder intensifies the poet's hold on his own false creation: Ma mentre tener fiso posso al primo pensier la mente vaga, et mirar lei et obliar me stesso, sento Amor si da presso che del suo proprio error 1'alma s'appaga; in tante parti et si bella la veggio che se 1'error durasse, altro non cheggio. (33-39) But as long as I can hold my yearning mind fixed on the first thought, and look at her and forget myself, I feel Love so close by that my soul is satisfied by its own deception; in so many places and so beautiful I see her, that, if the deception should last, I ask for no more. From this affirmation of the adequacy of the unreal — an unprecedently extreme affirmation and an important item in Petrarch's bequest to European lyricism29 — follows one of Petrarch's most rapturous passages: F 1'6 piu volte (or chi fia che mi '1 creda?) ne 1'acqua chiara et sopra 1'erba verde veduto viva, et nel troncon d'un faggio e 'n bianca nube, si fatta che Leda avria ben detto che sua figlia perde come Stella che '1 sol copre col raggio; et quanto in piu selvaggio loco mi trovo e 'n piu deserto lido, tanto piu bella il mio pensier Padombra. (40-48) I have many times (now who will believe me?) seen her alive in the clear water and on the green grass and in the trunk of a beech tree and in a white cloud, so beautiful that Leda would have said that her daughter faded like a star covered by the sun's ray; and in whatever wildest place and most deserted shore I find myself, so much the more beautiful does my thought shadow her forth. When external reality once more makes itself felt, the result is literature: Poi quando il vero sgombra quel dolce error, pur li medesmo assido me freddo, pietra morta in pietra viva, in guisa d'uom che pensi et pianga et scriva. (49-52.)

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Petrarch Then, when the truth dispels that sweet deception, right there in the same place I sit down, cold, a dead stone on the living rock, like a man who thinks and weeps and writes.

Whatever the biographical facts about Laura, Giacomo Colonna had a point: a conspicuous amount of Petrarch's energy goes into making her a simulatio to serve his own ends. "Di pensier in pensier" is among the most contented of Petrarch's love poems. Any melancholy in the lines just quoted is leavened by a culminating fantasy of Laura's distant reciprocation: Indi i miei danni a misurar con gli occhi comincio, e 'ntanto lagrimando sfogo di dolorosa nebbia il cor condense, alor ch'i' miro et penso quanta aria dal bel viso diparte che sempre m'e si presso et si lontano. Poscia fra me pian piano: "Che sai tu, lasso? forse in quella parte or di tua lontonanza si sospira." Et in questo penser 1'alma respira. (56-65) Thence I begin to measure my losses with my eyes, and then I weeping unburden my heart of the sorrowful cloud gathered in it, when I see and think how much air separates me from the lovely face that is always so near to me and so distant. Then to myself softly: "What do you know, wretch? perhaps off there someone is sighing now because of your absence." And in this thought my soul breathes more easily.

There is no pretense that this consolation is evidenced by anything but the lover's desire that it be true; once more his soul is satisfied with its own deception, and the poem celebrates that capability in just about those terms. The commiato locates the scene not in the Vaucluse but on the Italian side of the Alps; the poem seems to have been composed in early 1342, on Petrarch's slow way home from his laureation —a journey during which (according to the Letter to Posterity) he also caught his second wind for the stalled Africa. It seems a good guess that a more than usual distance from Laura plays its role in a more than usual ease about his own fantasizing, as the whole canzone is in a way about the uses of lontonanza (distance). The adjectives in line 61— si presso et si lontano — are interdependent: absence makes possible an intimate sense of imaginative presence. Lontonanza, here at its geographical extreme, is in one form or another always there in the Canzoniere. One of the central facts about Petrarch's love

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for Laura is that it is never consummated. His unsuccess is repeated in uncountable lyric sequences written under his influence; he himself seems to expect it from the start. The Petrarchan lover is, almost by definition, the rejected lover: Mille fiate, o dolce mia guerrera, per aver co'begli occhi vostri pace v'aggio proferto il cor, ma voi non piace mirar si basso colla mente altera. (Canz. 2.1.1-4) A thousand times, o my sweet warrior, in order to have peace with your lovely eyes, I have offered you my heart; but it does not please you to gaze so low with your lofty mind.

The point, time and again, is the persistence of the lover's single-minded devotion in the face of unyielding discouragement: et se di lui fors' altra donna spera, vive in speranza debile et fallace; mio, perche sdegno cio ch'a voi dispiace, esser non puo giamai cosi com'era. (2.1.5-8) and if some other lady has hopes of him, she lives in weak and fallacious hope; mine —since I disdain what does not please you —mine he can never be as before. So consistent is the situation that it comes as no surprise when the love story continues for a decade after Laura's death; Petrarch's desire does not in any ordinary way depend upon her availability. It is hard not to think that the nameless but indisputably real altra donna who bore the poet's children forfeited her claim precisely through her compliance.30 Neither this theme nor the sense of its importance in the business of love is new with Petrarch. At whatever biographical prompting, he gives voice to one of the most imposing paradoxes of our cultural heritage, one made durably visible two centuries earlier in Occitan lyric:31 ni res tant grieu no-s convertis com fai cho q'ieu vauc deziran; ni tal enveia no*m fai res con fai cho q'ieu non puosc haver. (Cercamon 3.9-12,) nothing is so hard to win over as that which I desire; and nothing fills me with such desire as does that which I cannot have.32

The elevation of the female object of desire into the central fact of a man's life — an elevation that marks an important point of contrast between antiq-

22

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uity and the new order assembling itself in the High Middle Ages — comes into European consciousness with something close to a conviction of the essential unattainability of that object: Ver ditz qui m'apella lechai ni desiron d'amor de loing, car nuills autre jois tant no*m plai cum gauzimens d'amor de loing; mas so q'eu vuoill m'es tan tai's q'enaissi*m fadet mos pairis q'ieu ames e non fos amatz. (Jaufre Rudel 6.43-49) Whoever calls me greedy and desirous of a distant love speaks the truth, for no other enjoyment pleases me as much as does the enjoyment of a distant love; but what I want is so kept from me, for so my godfather fixed my fate that I should love and not be loved. Such a stance is basic to the fin' amors of the troubadours; "one is tempted to conclude that the concept of true love was not framed to include success."33 It is a presupposition that can meet with various responses: anger at some third person, as is the case here with Jaufre — "toz sia mauditz lo pairis / qe-rn fadet q'ieu non fos amatz!" (51-52; cursed be the godfather who fixed my fate so that I should not be loved!) —or a brusquely practical impatience with the unresponsive woman: Ja ma mia no mi tenra si ieu leis non tenia; ni ja de mi non jauzira s'ieu de leis non jauzia. conseilh n'ai pres bon e certa: farai li segon que-m fara. (Peire Cardenal z.n-i6)34 Never will my mistress possess me if I possessed her not; nor will she ever have joy of me if I had not joy of her. I've made a decision, good and sure: I'll treat her as she treats me. (Press) Yet in other moods these poets find in frustration a rich opportunity, which they can solicit almost openly: De s'amistat me reciza! Mas be n'ai fiansa, que sivals eu n'ai conquiza la bela semblansa. Et ai ne a ma deviza tan de benanansa,

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que ja-1 jorn que 1'aurai viza, non aurai pezansa. Mo cor ai pres d'Amor, que Tesperitz lai cor, mas lo cors es sai, alhor, lonh de leis, en Fransa. (Bernart de Ventadorn 4.2.5-3 6)35 Let her make me keep my distance from her love — there's still one thing I'm sure of: I have conquered nothing less than her beautiful image. Cut off from her like this I have such bliss, that the day I see her again, not having seen her will not weigh on me. My heart stays close to Love, my spirit runs to it there, but my body is here, in another place, far from her, in France. (Goldin) Petrarch writes of possibilities already acknowledged, explored, and graced with the sanction of tradition. His novelty is to some extent the clarification of that tradition, the definitive exclusion of other possibilities. Troubadours, for one thing, do not assemble their poems in sequences36 — nor do trouveres or Minnesanger — and strictly speaking we do not know what happens in the silence at the end of a plaintive canso. We are free to wish the poor man well and move on to one of the other genres that circulate in the same corpus — to an alba (dawn poem), say: Car la gensor que anc nasques de maire tenc et abras, per qu'eu non prezi gaire lo fol gilos ni 1'alba. (Giraut de Bornelh 54.3 3-3 5)37 For the most noble woman that ever was born of mother I hold and embrace; hence I heed not the jealous fool, nor the dawn. (Press) No secure narrative contexts guide such selection; the prose razos and vidas that survive as explanations of the stories behind the poems have long been regarded as imaginative speculation based primarily on the poems themselves. The most famous —and fanciful, though credited by Petrarch in his Trionfi (Triumphus Cupidinis 4.52-53) — tells how Jaufre's amor de loing was roused by the countess of Tripoli, whom he had never seen (and who is never named in his poems); journeying to behold her, he became fatally ill. He was at least allowed to die in her arms; she was so moved that she entered a convent. Other texts attract less refined explanations, in which the poets often do even better by themselves: "Aimeric [de Peguilhan] came that night, and his companions carried him up and put him in a handsome bed. The next day Aimeric sent for the lady. She came into the room, recognized him, and was greatly shocked. She asked him how he could have gotten into Toulouse. And he said through love. Then Aimeric recounted the whole story to her. The lady

24

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pretended to tuck him in, and kissed him [bayzet lo]. Beyond this point, I don't know what happened. But en Aimeric stayed for a full ten days in that house under the pretext of illness."38 Petrarch's poems attract a similar tradition of biographical elaboration, but its scope is more limited —to supposing, for instance (to cite one long-lasting conjecture), that in Canzoniere 155 Laura is weeping over the death of her mother. (How do we know, asks one seicento skeptic, that it isn't her cat that died?)39 Surmise is straitened by a canonical arrangement that makes clear that every plea was unavailing. The only alba is subjunctive: Con lei foss'io da che si parte il sole, et non ci vedess'altri che le stelle, sol una notte et mai non fosse 1'alba. (22.31-33) Might I be with her from when the sun departs and no other see us but the stars, just one night, and let the dawn never come!

The final poem affirms the impossibility of any such event: "ch'ogni altra sua voglia / era a me morte et a lei fama rea" (3 66.96-97; for any other desire in her would have been death to me and dishonor to her). The definitive sequentiality of Petrarch's collection — not its least influential feature — ties the individual poems firmly to a narrative context in which, sexually, nothing happens. Within that context many of the themes of troubadour and stilnovist lyric deploy themselves without notable change, but there are distinctly Petrarchan inflections that make the scripted outcome especially credible. For the Petrarchan lover is not merely the frustrated lover but to a new degree the paralyzed lover, incapable not only of satisfying but even of acting on his desire. The mythic version of this impotence identifies Laura with Medusa, whose mere visage is catastrophically debilitating:40 ella ne 1'usata sua figura tosto tornando fecemi, oime lasso! d'un quasi vivo et sbigottito sasso. (23.78-80) she to her accustomed form quickly returning made me, alas, an almost living and terrified stone.

The trope's proximate source is a disturbing quartet of poems by Dante (his so-called rime petrose) but it now has the power to encrypt an uncanny authorial signature — "me freddo, pietra morta in pietra viva" (129.51; I cold, a dead rock on the living rock) — and in various wordings filters through the entire sequence, indeed providing one of its termini: "Medusa et 1'error mio m'an fatto un sasso / d'umor vano stillante" (366.111-12; Medusa and my error have made me a stone dripping vain moisture). Medusa is glossed by

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25

some mythographers as the danger that female beauty can present to the susceptible male, but her full impingement on love poetry is a new note; when a sculpture of the beloved in the Roman de la Rose is compared to Medusa, we are told that it does not kill the viewer or turn him into stone but gives him added power for the final assault.41 Petrarch is petrified. We glimpse an immediate narrative dimension of his disabling in the difficulty that he has in even speaking to Laura: Perch'io t'abbia guardata di menzogna a mio podere et onorato assai, ingrata lingua, gia pero non m'ai renduto onor, ma fatto ira et vergogna; che quando piu '1 tuo aiuto mi bisogna per dimandar mercede, allor ti stai sempre piu fredda, et se parole fai son imperfette et quasi d'uom che sogna! (49.1-8) Although I have kept you from lying, as far as I could, and paid you much honor, ungrateful tongue, still you have not brought me honor but shame and anger; for, the more I need your help to ask for mercy, the colder and colder you stay, and if you say any words they are broken and like those of a man dreaming! The matter provides the dominant topic for one canzone, in which a suggestion that things were not always so only makes the lover affirm his present resolution: Nel cominciar credia trovar parlando al mio ardente desire qualche breve riposo et qualche triegua; questa speranza ardire mi porse a ragionar quel ch'i' sentia, or m'abbandona al tempo et si dilegua. Ma pur conven che Talta impresa segua continuando 1'amorose note, si possente e '1 voler che mi trasporta. (73.16-24) At the beginning I thought to find, through speech, for my burning desire some brief repose and some truce. This hope gave me the daring to speak of what I feel; now it abandons me in my need and dissolves. But still I must follow the high undertaking, continuing my amorous notes, so powerful is the will that carries me away. By the end he has divested himself of any real hope that his aphasia may pass; it is an essential part of love's effect on him:

26

Petrarch Solamente quel nodo ch'Amor cerconda a la mia lingua quando 1'umana vista il troppo lume avanza, fosse disciolto, i' prenderei baldanza di dir parole in quel punto si nove che farian lagrimar chi le 'ntendesse. Ma le ferite impresse volgon per forza il cor piagato altrove, ond'io divento smorto e '1 sangue si nasconde, i' non so dove, ne rimango qual era; et sommi accorto che questo e '1 colpo di che Amor m'a morto. (79-90) If only that knot which Love ties around my tongue when the excess of light overpowers my mortal sight were loosened, I would take boldness to speak words at that moment so strange that they would make all who heard them weep. But the deep wounds turn my wounded heart forcefully away; I become pale, and my blood hides itself, I know not where, nor do I remain what I was: and I have become aware that this is the blow with which Love has killed me.

The commiato effaces the weary attempt to persuade Laura into a seemingly endless internal colloquy: Canzone, i' sento gia stancar la penna del lungo et dolce ragionar con lei, ma non di parlar meco i pensier miei. (91-93) Song, I feel my pen already tired from the long and sweet speech with her, but not my thoughts of speaking with me. Late in the second century comes the definitive statement; the failure of speech is literal, habitual, and systematic: Pien d'un vago penser che me desvia da tutti gli altri, et fammi al mondo ir solo, ad or ad ora a me stesso m'involo pur lei cercando che fuggir devria; et veggiola passar si dolce et ria che 1'alma trema per levarsi a volo, tal d'armati sospir conduce stuolo questa bella d'Amor nemica et mia. Ben s'i' non erro, di pietate un raggio scorgo fra '1 nubiloso altero ciglio, che 'n parte rasserena il cor doglioso;

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27

allor raccolgo Palma, et poi ch'i' aggio di scovrirle il mio mal preso consiglio, tanto gli 6 a dir che 'ncominciar non oso. (169) Full of a yearning thought that makes me stray away from all others and go alone in the world, from time to time I steal myself away from myself, still seeking only her whom I should flee; and I see her pass so sweet and cruel that my soul trembles to rise in flight, such a crowd of armed sighs she leads, this lovely enemy of Love and me. If I do not err, I do perceive a gleam of pity on her cloudy, proud brow, which partly clears my sorrowing heart: then I collect my soul, and, when I have decided to discover my ills to her, I have so much to say to her that I dare not begin. The blockage is not a contingent failure of wit or linguistic resource, but entailed by the very fullness of the emotion longing to be expressed. Something in the nature of il mio mal interferes, time and again, with any explicit appeal or even discovery to the one person able to make a difference; the story visible behind the Canzoniere is one less of unsuccessful seduction than of a more inward, unaccountable scenario of self-censorship. For the formulation of his final paradox, Petrarch probably availed himself of Arnaut Daniel's lines about sobramar, "overlove": Sols sui que sai lo sobraffan qe-m sortz al cor d'amor sofren per sobramar, car mos volers es tant ferms et entiers, c'anc no s'esduis de celliei ni s'estors, cui encubic al prim vezer e puois, c'ades ses lieis die a lieis cochos motz; pois qand la vei, non sai — tant 1'ai — que dire. (15.1-7) I am the only one who knows the overwoe that rises in the heart from love in suffering through overlove, for my will is so firm and so entire that it never fled from her or turned aside, the one whom I desired at the first sight and after, for still, without her, I speak to her heated words; then when I see her, I don't know — so much I have — what to say.42 The tongue-tied lover is indeed a common figure in troubadour lyric, though he is apt to be treated with some impatience; Giraut de Bornelh is rudely pragmatic: Per que*t laissas aissi morir? — Car sui trop vergonhos efis.— Nol'asrequis? — Eu, per Deu, no! —

28

Petrarch E per que menas tal tenso, tro aias saubut so talen? — Senher, fai me tal espaven. — Que-lfai?S'amors que*m ten en greu esmai. — Be n'as gran tort; cudas te qu'ela t'o aport? . . . Tu venras denan leis viatz et enquerras la de s'amor. — E si s'o ten a dezonor? — No'tchal! — E s'ela*m respon lach ni mal? — Sias sofrens, que totztems bos sofrire vens! — E si*s n'apercep lo gilos? — Adonc n'obraretz plus ginhos. (2.12-22, 28-36) Why do you thus submit to death? — Because I am too shy and noble-minded. — You have asked nothing of her? — No, in God's name, not I! — Then why do you carry on this self-torture before you've known what she feels? — My lord, it inspires in me such terror. —What does? — Her love, for which I'm in great dismay. — You're very wrong in this; do you suppose that she'd bring it to you?... You shall hasten to her presence and ask her for her love. — And if she takes it as a dishonor? —Don't worry!—And if she makes me a cruel and angry answer? — Be patient, for loyal patience always wins through. — And if the jealous one gets to know about it? —Then you'll both proceed more surreptitiously. (Press)

With suitable peer counseling, the lover's shyness stands a chance of being only a temporary glitch.43 At another pole, however, are declarations such as that of Peire Rogier, who describes a similar reticence as deliberate policy and an object of some pride: De totz drutz suy ieu lo plus fis, qu'a midons no die re ni man nH quier gen fait ni bel semblan; cum qu'ilh m'estey, sos drutz suy et ab lieys dompney totz cubertz e celatz e quetz, qu'ilh no sap lay lo ben que-m fai, ni cum ai per lieys joy e pretz; ni*s tanh que ia-1 sapch'enoios, qu'ieu suy sai sos drutz a rescos.

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Anc ieu ni autre no'lh o dis, ni elha non saup mon talan, mas a celat 1'am atretan — fe qu'ieu li dey — cum s'agues fait son drut de mey. (3.2.3-38)44 Of all lovers I am the best, who do not speak to my lady or ask anything or seek a kind act or a friendly face. However she behaves toward me, I am her lover and I court her in total concealment, secrecy, and silence, so that she does not know the good she does me, nor how through her I have joy and honor; nor is it right that the troublemaker know that I am her lover here in secret. Neither I nor anyone else has told her this, nor does she know of my longing, I love her as much in secret — such devotion I have to her — as if she had made me her lover.

The reference to the troublesome gilos briefly invokes the practical dimension to this secrecy, but such considerations all but disappear into a deeper refinement of self-denial. It is not even a matter of sparing a virtuous woman the awkwardness of refusing an importunate suggestion; she is to be spared even knowing that her lover might be interested. Peire's vida, for whatever it may be worth, suggests that he was not entirely successful in putting his program into action; the lady Ermengarda eventually banished him from Narbonne for fear of what people were saying. By his own account, Petrarch did no better at keeping things quiet. ben veggio or si come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me medesmo meco mi vergogno. (Canz. 1.9-11) now I see well how for a long time I was the talk of the crowd, for which often I am ashamed of myself within.

Yet from certain angles the Canzoniere can make us wonder if the lover is not pursuing Peire's policy with slightly duplicitous rigor. Very early in the sequence he looks forward to Laura's loss of beauty in old age as an event that might make it possible for him finally to speak to her openly: pur mi dara tanta baldanza Amore ch' i' vi discovriro de' miei martiri qua' sono stati gli anni, e i giorni, et 1'ore. (12.9-11) then at least Love will give me so much boldness that I shall disclose to you what have been the years and the days and the hours of my sufferings.

Over three hundred poems later, we learn that the conversation never took place during her lifetime:

3o

Petrarch L'aura mia sacra al mio stance riposo spira si spesso ch' i' prendo ardimento di dirle il mal ch'i' 6 sentito et sento, che vivendo ella non sarei stat' oso. F incomincio da quel guardo amoroso che fu principio a si lungo tormento ... (3 56.1-6) My sacred breeze breathes so often for my repose in weariness that I become bold to tell her the ills I have felt and feel, which I would not have dared to do while she was alive. I begin with that love-inspiring glance that was the beginning of so long a torment...

And in the final poem, Petrarch seems to tell us that Laura did not even intuit what she was not told, but "de mille miei mali un non sapea" (366.94; of my thousand sufferings did not know one). This statement might mean that Laura did not herself feel pangs of unsatisfied desire or that, though she knew of Petrarch's love, she did not know the extent of his suffering; but the former possibility strains the sense of sapere and is out of key with the context (we have just been told how she, when alive, kept Petrarch's heart in weeping), and the latter does not do justice to the contrast between mille and un. Some commentators have given particular emphasis to un to yield a different sense — "there was one of my mali she did not know" — and taken this single secret to be Petrarch's lust, which he presumably edited from all his declarations of love.45 This reading may seem too extreme to depend on a somewhat literalminded treatment of the language of hyperbole, but in fact the simplest gloss is even more radical: Laura had no idea that Petrarch was in love with her in any sense. He goes on to affirm that things would have come out the same in any case — et per saperlo pur quel che n'avenne fora avvenuto, ch'ogni altra sua voglia era a me morte et a lei fama rea (366.95-97) and though she had known them, what happened would still have happened, for any other desire in her would have been death to me and dishonor to her — but he seems at the same time to be admitting that this is mere surmise, because Laura apparently never had the opportunity to react at all. That possibility goes against the usual impression that readers take from the sequence: "There is no more glaring contradiction in the whole Laura-saga than thus so bluntly to deny her any such knowledge of her lover's heart as had been so repeatedly asserted or implied."46 Yet on inspection most of those assertions and implications turn soft. We have heard Laura defend her rejection of her lover as an act of kindness for both of them:

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"Fedel mio caro, assai di te mi dole, ma pur per nostro ben dura ti fui" (341.12-13) "My dear faithful one, I am much grieved for you, but still for our good I was cruel to you" Yet she does so not in ordinary dialogue but in a kind of spectral visitation: ch'ancor sento tornar pur come soglio Madonna in quel suo atto dolce onesto ad acquetare il cor misero et mesto. (3-5) For again, as I am wont, I feel my lady return with that sweet chaste bearing of hers to quiet my wretched sad heart. Virtually all the direct discourse reported from Laura comes in the context of such visitations.47 The first of these is in Canzoniere 33, but most of them come much later, after a dream in which Laura forecasts her own imminent death (250; the poem implies that numerous intervening instances have gone unreported). On subsequent occasions she speaks as a spirit from beyond the grave, often to assert a role very like that of Dante's Beatrice: "In questa spera / sarai ancor meco, se '1 desir non erra" (302.5-6; "In this sphere you will be with me, if my desire is not deceived"). Following Dante's lead in the Vita nuova, her lover now begins to address her, as he had not before, in the second person singular. The most momentous posthumous declaration comes in the Trionfi, where Laura confesses something close to full reciprocation of her lover's feelings: Fur quasi eguali in noi fiamme amorose, almen poi ch'i' m'avidi del tuo foco; ma Pun le paleso, 1'altro 1'ascose. (Triumphus Mortis 2.. 139-41) Almost equal flames of love were in us, once I had known of your fire; but one of us publicized it, the other hid it. Reproach for his immoderation and indiscreetness is still in her voice, but the new knowledge is sweet, especially the innuendo that her desire arose in answer to his; if only he had known that his longing had summoned its own satisfaction into existence. The revelation would dramatically revise our entire sense of what is happening in the Canzoniere, were its logic not so exactly that of wish fulfillment; dying into dreams and visions, Laura becomes more and more ready to say what her lover wants to hear. Within the fictional span of her life, her response is more obliquely rendered. Very early in the Canzoniere, her initial rejection of her lover — a rejection apparently simultaneous with her first knowledge of his feelings —is evoked through its enduring effect on her dress:

32

Petrarch Lassare il velo per sole o per ombra, Donna, non vi vid'io poi che in me conosceste il gran desio ch'ogni altra voglia d'entr'al cor mi sgombra. Mentr'io portava i be' pensier' celati ch'anno la mente desiando morta, vidivi di pietate ornare il volto; ma poi ch'Amor di me vi fece accorta, fuor i biondi capelli allor velati et Pamoroso sguardo in se raccolto. (n.i-io) Lady, I have never seen you put aside your veil for sun or for shadow since you knew the great desire in me that lightens my heart of all other wishes. While I carried my lovely thoughts hidden (with desire they are bringing death into my heart) I saw you adorn your face with pity; but since Love has made you aware of me, your blond hair has been veiled and your lovely gaze kept to itself.

We have already read that the lover's state is "seguitar costei che 'n fuga e volta" (6.2.; pursuing her who has turned in flight); he here purports to locate the moment at which that flight began. It presumably comes at some point after his own enamorment, the date and occasion of which he so fastidiously fixes for us; the event behind this poem would in effect be the second important thing that happened in the story he has to tell. Yet he is already being chary about exactly what happened. He does not say that Laura's flight resulted from his disclosure of his passion; his circuitous phrasing would be consistent with secondhand communication or, more likely, Laura's own insightful reading of his inarticulate demeanor. In a similar spirit, he does not say that that flight was manifested in any way more overt than the new consistency with which she has veiled herself in his presence; what he is offering us is his own putatively insightful reading of her demeanor, which may or may not have come with some verbal gloss. The reverberations of that reading through the rest of the sequence are strong but ambiguous. Some eighty poems later the same equation works in reverse when Petrarch is aroused by the sight of Laura's unveiled hair and cannot resist the hope that its visibility is a signal of her reciprocation: Erano i capei d'oro a 1'aura sparsi che 'n mille dolci nodi gli avolgea, e '1 vago lume oltra misura ardea di quei begli occhi, ch'or ne son si scarsi; e '1 viso di pietosi color farsi (non so se vero o falso) mi parea:

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i' che 1'esca amorosa al petto avea, qual meraviglia se di subito arsi? (90.1-8) Her golden hair was loosed to the breeze, which turned it in a thousand sweet knots, and the lovely light burned without measure in her eyes, which are now so stingy of it; and it seemed to me (I know not whether truly or falsely) her face took on the color of pity: I, who had the tinder of love in my breast, what wonder is it if I suddenly caught fire?

Yet even as he relates the scene, he doubts his ability to interpret the woman's behavior accurately. The moment itself has already passed; Laura's eyes are again stingy of their light. It is possible that what is being recalled here is the original moment of enamorment, or at least —as Canzoniere 12.7.62 seems to attest, Laura would probably have been veiled in the church of St. Clare — some point before everything was darkened by her knowledge of that enamorment. Tradition has tended to guess otherwise, to refer the poem to some later point at which Petrarch found his hopes temporarily raised by Laura's apparent reversal of the resolution manifested in Canzoniere n. It does seem clear that Laura's hair did not permanently disappear from his view; yet the next important vision of it strikes him with precisely the contrary sense: Or vedi, Amor, che giovenetta donna tuo regno sprezza et del mio mal non cura, et tra duo ta' nemici e si secura. Tu se' armato, et ella in treccie e 'n gonna si siede et scalza in mezzo i fiori et 1'erba, ver me spietata e 'ncontr' a te superba. (12.1.1-6) Now see, Love, how a young woman scorns your rule and cares nothing for my harm, and between two such enemies is so confident. You are in armor, and she in a mere robe with loose hair is sitting barefoot amid the flowers and the grass, pitiless toward me and proud toward you.

Now the unveiling of her hair is an act of arrogant tantalization, a cruel reminder of her unattainability. The reader's conviction of receiving any secure information about Laura's actions and their intent disappears into such labyrinths, and with it any trust in an intelligible sequence of narrative events. The Renaissance editor Alessandro Vellutello went so far as to rearrange the poems to create, if not a different outcome, at least a better continuity; Canzoniere 90, for instance, becomes the beneficent climax of a new episode of estrangement and reconciliation confected mostly out of poems from the second and third centuries and located with appropriate effect shortly before Laura's death (121 is moved up to a much earlier site in the third decade).48 Such tinkering, however understandable, is

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not only unsanctioned by the evidence but also may distract us from a narrative ambiguity that Petrarch persistently deploys within the individual poems. Laura's very approach for the sequence's few scenes of direct encounter makes the poet's subjective filter all the more clearly audible: Quel vago impallidir, che '1 dolce riso d'un'amorosa nebbia ricoperse, con tanta maiestade al cor s'offerse che li si fece incontr' a mezzo '1 viso. Conobbi allor si come in paradiso vede 1'un 1'altro; in tal guisa s'aperse quel pietoso penser ch'altri non scerse, ma vidil io, ch'altrove non m'affiso. Ogni angelica vista, ogni atto umile che giamai in donna ov'amor fosse apparve, fora uno sdegno a lato a quel ch'io dico. Chinava a terra il bel guardo gentile et tacendo dicea, come a me parve: "Chi m'allontana il mio fedele amico?" (12.3) That lovely pallor, which covered her sweet smile with a cloud of love, with so much majesty presented itself to my heart that he went to meet it in the midst of my face. I learned then how they see each other in Paradise; so clearly did that merciful thought open itself, which no one else perceived, but I saw it, for I fix myself nowhere else. Every angelic expression, every humble gesture that ever appeared in a lady who harbored love, would be scorn beside what I speak of. She bent to earth her lovely noble glance and in her silence said, as it seemed to me: "Who sends away from me my faithful friend?"

The language of the second quatrain ranks with the most beatific in the sequence, registering a moment of transcendent communion with Laura, yet the very logic of that transcendence entails a suppression of any other standard of objective communication. In heaven the blessed see into one another's minds without the mediation of words, and that is how these earthly lovers speak, in a way that could not be overheard. What decodes this secret language is precisely the capacity for obsession: "altrove non m'affiso." The encounter apparently begins with Petrarch's sense of some altered nuance in Laura's expression — pallor inflecting her smile with amorous innuendo — to which he responds in kind: his heart pressing into his face. The episode ends as she lowers her own face — probably the only action that a third-person witness might note — and Petrarch reads this gesture as an expression of solicitousness for his imminent departure. But what is grammatically a direct quotation was evidently not spoken out loud, and is given only on the authority of his own

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interpretation: "come a me parve." We do not have to move too far from the lover's own tranced line of sight to wonder if as far as Laura was concerned nothing happened beyond a casual acknowledgment on the street. Such events as Petrarch imagines here can be real, as they sometimes unmistakably are in the sequences of Petrarchan imitators. The meaning, for instance, that Sidney's Astrophil hesitantly assigns to Stella's averted eyes — "They fled with blush, which guiltie seem'd of love" (Astrophil and Stella 66.14) — is uncertain at the time — "I cannot brag of word, much lesse of deed" (5) —but receives explicit confirmation three poems later: "Stella hath with words where faith doth shine, / Of her high heart giv'n me the monarchic" (69.9-10). Vellutello seeks to secure the momentousness of Canzoniere 12,3 by placing it very late, so that it follows the graciousness of 90 and records the last meeting between Petrarch and Laura before the latter's death. Its canonical placement links it to the earlier Italian journey out of which 129 was written, and the unusually hopeful fantasy at the end of that canzone may owe something to a sense that some new understanding with Laura had been achieved before leaving. Yet the situation to which Petrarch returns bears no obvious sign of the fervently rendered scene of parting; indeed, we come quickly to one of the sequence's classic diagrams of Petrarchan frustration: Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna e '1 suo seggio maggior nel mio cor tene, talor armato ne la fronte vene, ivi si loca et ivi pon sua insegna. Quella ch'amare et sofferir ne 'nsegna e vol che '1 gran desio, 1'accesa spene, ragion, vergogna, et reverenza affrene, di nostro ardir fra se stessa si sdegna. Onde Amor paventoso fugge al core, lasciando ogni sua impresa, et piange et trema; ivi s'asconde et non appar piu fore. Che poss'io far, temendo il mio signore, se non star seco infin a 1'ora estrema? che bel fin fa chi ben amando more. (140) Love, who lives and reigns in my thought and keeps his principal seat in my heart, sometimes comes forth all in armor into my forehead, there camps, and there sets up his banner. She who teaches us to love and to be patient, and wishes my great desire, my kindled hope, to be reined in by reason, shame, and reverence, at our boldness is angry within herself. Wherefore Love flees terrified to my heart, abandoning his every enterprise, and weeps and trembles; there he hides and no more appears outside. What can I do, when

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Petrarch my lord is afraid, except stay with him until the last hour? For he makes a good end who dies loving well.

The poem begins and ends with love firmly resident within the lover's heart and thought. The emphasis, as things play themselves out, is as much on the inwardness of this emotion as on its perdurability, though the two qualities are closely entangled. The sonnet's plot is love's quickly abandoned attempt to break out of that inwardness, followed by the lover's resolution that such failure, however decisive, does not change things for him: unreturned or even unsanctioned by his lady, love is still its own sufficient justification. Such is precisely the Petrarchan status quo that becomes the standard for subsequent tradition: love that, as a cinquecento commentator on the poem puts it, is and is supposed to be "wishful and mental [intenzionale, e mentale] . . . without any apparent external action."49 Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, produced famous translations of this poem, a natural one for the first wave of English Petrarchism. Yet both of them obscured the care with which Petrarch compromises the momentousness of the event by keeping love's sortie within the same ambiguous circuit as he does the paradisal dialogue in 113. The act of aggression is described only as a movement of inner feeling into the face, and a suspicion that this need not mean anything more than a subtle change of expression is substantiated by the statement that Laura is displeased "fra se stessa," within herself—a phrase that both English poets omit. What we are being told is that this inner displeasure is itself enough to arrest the lover's expeditionary campaign: because he fixes himself nowhere else, that thought reveals itself to him in an act of communication similar to that by which Laura had earlier expressed displeasure at his leaving. But for the reader, of course, that very assertion once more holds open the possibility that nothing happened at all except in the lover's own mind; this rebuke is no more authoritative than the preceding encouragement, and making a causal narrative connection between the two poems may well be our own wishful thinking. What definitely does not evolve in the Canzoniere is anything like the firmly consecutive stages of Dante's progress in the Vita nuova — stages demarcated by small but distinct signals from Beatrice. Precisely nine years after his first, sight of her, "she greeted me with exceeding virtue [mi salutoe molto virtuosamente\, such that I then seemed to see all the terms of beatitude . . . and because that was the first time that her words were moved to come to my ears, I experienced such sweetness that like one inebriated I left all company and resorted to the solitary place of my room" (3.i-i).50 The first poem follows. Some time later, Beatrice takes offense at the way in which her devotee is using

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another woman as a screen, and "passing by a certain place, denied me her so dear greeting [salutare], in which was all my beatitude" (10.2). This denial prompts a digression on how essential that saluto had become to him; there follows a time of distress and, at a gathering where Beatrice is present, public humiliation. In due course, though, Dante comes to realize that estrangement has merely clarified his poetic vocation: "In that greeting lay my beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires. But because it pleased her to deny it to me, my Lord Love, in his mercy, has placed all my beatitude in that which cannot fail me[:]... In those words that praise my lady.... Since so much beatitude lies in those words that praise my lady, why have other words been mine?" (18.4-8). The next poem is the famous philosophical canzone, "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore"; the next narrative event, a few pages later, is Beatrice's death, initiating a final phase of reassessment and resolution. The absence of such sequential clarity in Petrarch is to some extent a product simply of the absence of prose links between the poems. Petrarch gives us a Vita nuova with the prose removed: that is a common account of the generic origins of the Canzoniere, one that can prompt such claims as C. S. Lewis's: "The first thing to grasp about the sonnet sequence is that it is not a way of telling a story."51 Stripped to its poems, the Vita nuova would in fact be something less of a story than the Canzoniere, because Petrarch has infolded more in the way of narrative occasion into his verses than Dante has; but the point still holds, because the infoldings remain infoldings, difficult to unpack, and almost everything we glimpse of the external action takes place behind the scrim of the lover's own reactions. Those actions may even be described as a kind of backlighting meant to give that scrim visibility; both the poems themselves and the matrix into which they are set conduce to a poetics of radical impressionability ("non la chose, mais 1'effet qu'elle produit"), into which the outside world all but disappears. Making it (almost) disappear is a major part of the artfulness of the Canzoniere, and fretting about the plot is finally not a way to recover biographical information but rather a way to specify that artfulness. As far as the facts are concerned, it is prima facie more reasonable to trust the harsh candor of the Secretum, where a fairly aggressive propositioning of Laura is recalled: "Unmoved by my entreaties, unyielding to my caress, she safeguarded her woman's honor, and in spite of her youth and mine, in spite of a thousand circumstances that would have bent a heart of adamant, she stood her ground, resolute and unsubdued" (p. 130).52 That account could if necessary be squared with the Canzoniere; such is the leeway built into Petrarch's presentation. But the novelty of that presentation comes in telling the story in a way that also leaves us thinking that he might as well never have spoken to Laura, that she might as

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well have had no clue to his intent. From repeated references to her dolci parole —are we to imagine their being in Occitan? —we may trust that he heard her speak, but we cannot be sure that she ever actually spoke to him. When first we hear of Laura's "benigna angelica salute" (37.92.), it is as something already denied him. When he later appears to recover that privilege, the specificity of the claim shimmers: Volgendo gli occhi al mio novo colore, che fa di morte rimembrar la gente, pieta vi mosse; onde benignamente salutando teneste in vita il core. (63.1-4) Turning your eyes to my strange color, which makes people remember death, pity moved you; wherefore, kindly greeting me, you kept my heart alive. The situation is almost exactly that of Canzoniere 12.3, and it is not clear (does "onde" introduce "salutando" or "teneste"?) that the greeting in the fourth line is something different from the (wordless) look that begins in the first; the emphasis is in any case, much more powerfully than in Dante, on the effect of the woman's eyes. Another instance of Laura's saluto in 111 is similarly evasive. For all we know, the granting and withholding of her regard, like all the densely textured signaling between her and her lover, might as well have taken place only in his own tranced imagination. In the longest and most complex poem in the sequence, that possibility leaves its mark on the central symbolism of the laurel itself.53 From an early stage the myth of Daphne was envisioned as a shaping fiction of that sequence, which was originally to have begun with what is now Canzoniere 34, where the poet both identifies himself with Apollo and calls on the god for aid in defending their joint bel desio. Petrarch's interest in the myth is overdetermined; it ties the artistic and civic symbolism not just to a love story but specifically to one of female unattainability and male frustration. Ovid, in passing, gives epigrammatic expression to just that inconvenient capacity of desire to which Petrarch and his Occitan predecessors had devoted so much of their attention: nudabant corpora uenti, obuiaque aduersas uibrabant flamina uestes, et leuis inpulsos retro dabat aura capillos, auctaque forma fuga est. (Metamorphoses i.^-y-^o)54 the winds exposed her limbs, gusts of air fluttered her clothing as she ran, and a light breeze scattered her hair behind her, and her beauty was heightened by her flight.

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In his most extended version of the myth, however, Petrarch elides the pursuit into a disorienting conclusion: sentendo il crudel di ch'io ragiono infin allor percossa di suo strale non essermi passato oltra la gonna, prese in sua scorta una possente Donrm, ver cui poco giamai mi valse o vale ingegno o forza o dimandar perdono; ei duo mi trasformaro in quel ch'i' sono, facendomi d'uom vivo un lauro verde che per fredda stagion foglia non perde. (23.32-40) that cruel one of whom I speak [Love], seeing that as yet no blow of his arrows had gone beyond my garment, took as his patroness a powerful Lady, against whom wit or force or asking pardon has helped or helps me little: those two transformed me into what I am, making me of a living man a green laurel that loses no leaf for all the cold season. The lover does not win but becomes the laurel, with a grotesque literalness making it clear that the shock is his as well as the reader's: Qual mi fec'io quando primier m'accorsi de la trasfigurata mia persona, e i capei vidi far di quella fronde di che sperato avea gia lor corona, e i piedi in ch'io mi stetti et mossi et corsi, com'ogni membro a 1'anima risponde, diventar due radici sovra 1'onde non di Peneo ma d'un piu altero flume, e 'n duo rami mutarsi ambe le braccia! (41-49) What I became, when I first grew aware of my person being transformed and saw my hairs turning into those leaves which I had formerly hoped would be my crown, and my feet, on which I stood and moved and ran, as every member answers to the soul, becoming two roots beside the waves not of Peneus but of a prouder river, and my arms changing into two branches! He has become the object of his desire. This transformation is only the first in what becomes known as the canzone delle metamorfosi. Subsequent Ovidian episodes can be even more explicit about the relations between erotic failure and a growing sense of poetic vocation; the conflated fates of Daphne and Apollo are directly succeeded by the composite destinies of Phaeton and Cygnus:

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Petrarch et giamai poi la mia lingua non tacque mentre poteo del suo cader maligno, ond'io presi col suon color d'un cigno. (58-60) and from then on my tongue was never silent about its evil fall, as long as it had power; and I took on with the sound of a swan its color.

This new eloquence does not merely give voice to despair, but is achieved precisely in the loss of any prospect of persuasive effectiveness: Cos! lungo 1'amate rive andai, che volendo parlar, cantava sempre, merce chiamando con estrania voce; ne mai in si dolci o in si soavi tempre risonar seppi gli amorosi guai che '1 cor s'umiliasse aspro et feroce. (61-66) Thus I went along the beloved shores, and, wishing to speak, I sang always, calling for mercy with a strange voice; nor was I ever able to make my amorous woes resound in so sweet or soft a temper that her harsh and ferocious heart was humbled.

The ambition to speak and change the world is metamorphosed into the power to sing: cantare making its first appearance in the sequence. It is a source of unending beauty that makes nothing happen.55 Within this mythic armature Laura makes her closest approach to direct discourse. We hear first of speech which forbids speech: Questa che col mirar gli animi fura m'aperse il petto, el' cor prese con mano, dicendo a me: "Di cio non far parola." (71-74) She, who with her glance steals souls, opened my breast and took my heart with her hand, saying to me: "Make no word of this."

The consequence is, after another episode of failed presumption in which she informs him, 'T non son forse chi tu credi" (83; I am not perhaps who you think I am),56 an explicit effacement of speech into writing: Le vive voci m'erano interditte, ond'io gridai con carta et con incostro: "Non son mio, no; s'io moro il danno e vostro." (98-100) Words spoken aloud were forbidden me; so I cried out with paper and ink: "I am not my own, no; if I die, yours is the loss."

Vive voci are progressively being displaced by an estrania voce in which the lover becomes a stranger to himself. In the penultimate metamorphosis, he is

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Echo, a voice now wholly abstracted from a petrified body, and become the voice of death: i nervi et 1'ossa mi volse in dura selce, et cosi scossa voce rimasi de Pantiche some, chiamando Morte et lei sola per nome. (137-40) she turned my sinews and bones into hard flint, and thus I remained a voice shaken from my former burden, calling Death and only her by name. The final myth is that of Actaeon, rendered with perhaps the least alteration from its Ovidian source: F segui' tanto avanti il mio desire ch'un di cacciando si com'io solea, mi mossi, e quella fera bella et cruda in una fonte ignuda si stava, quando '1 sol piu forte ardea. lo perche d'altra vista non m'appago stetti a mirarla, ond'ella ebbe vergogna et per fame vendetta o per celarse 1'acqua nel viso co le man mi sparse. Vero diro; forse e' parra menzogna: ch'i' senti' trarmi de la propria imago et in un cervo solitario et vago di selva in selva ratto mi trasformo, et ancor de' miei can fuggo lo stormo. (147-60) I followed so far my desire that one day, hunting as I was wont, I went forth, and that lovely cruel wild creature was in a spring naked when the sun burned most strongly. I, who am not appeased by any other sight, stood to gaze on her, whence she felt shame and, to take revenge or to hide herself, sprinkled water in my face with her hand. I shall speak the truth, perhaps it will appear a lie, for I felt myself drawn from my own image and into a solitary wandering stag from wood to wood quickly I am transformed and still I flee the belling of my hounds. The shift into the present tense signals that this is at last the decisive transformation; we shift in the same words to a reflexive syntax ("mi trasformo"). Durling reads the episode as rounding the series off with a meticulous "inversion of the myth of Daphne" ("Daphne, as she runs, looks into the water and becomes a tree, takes root; Actaeon, who is standing still, branches into a stag, grows hooves, flees, sees his reflection and flees the more"; pp. 28-29). Yet Actaeon's fate rounds things off in another way, by dramatically paralleling and reinforcing Petrarch's own alteration of Daphne's story: again the woman

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under pursuit is suddenly replaced by the lover himself. The dogs that now bear down on him are, in the usual symbolism, his own thoughts and desires; in context, their baying also completes the career of his alienated speech, now definitively failing of its object and returning upon its helpless creator. Petrarch is within a single letter of saying as much — "anchor de' miei cant' fuggo lo stormo" —and the scene mimics the condition that he has already said renders this poem almost superfluous: "quasi in ogni valle / rimbombi il suon de' miei gravi sospiri" (11-13; Almost every valley echoes to the sound of my heavy sighs). He has whelmed himself in the world of his own plaintive artfulness.57 The myth that seems to be immanent here without ever being directly invoked — Durling finds its components scattered across the canzone's landscape58 — is one whose relevance had repeatedly been asserted by Petrarch's predecessors: Anc non agui de me poder ni no fui meus de 1'or' en sai que-m laisset en sos olhs vezer en un miralh que mout me plai. Miralhs, pus me mirei en te, m'an mort li sospir de preon, c'aissi*m perdei com perdet se lo bels Narcisus en la fon. (Bernart de Ventadorn 31.17-2.4) I have never had the power of myself, I have not been my own man since that moment when she let me look into her eyes, into a mirror that gives great pleasure, even now. Mirror, since I beheld myself in you, the sighs from my depths have slain me, and I have lost myself, as fair Narcissus lost himself in the fountain. (Goldin)

Gazing so described is part of the standard furniture of medieval love poetry. It is a look into the fontaine of Narcissus that enamors the lover in the Roman de la Rose (i4i5ff.); Dante activates this tradition when, at a crucial moment in the Purgatorio, he turns away from Beatrice's face: Li occhi mi cadder giu nel chiaro fonte; ma veggendomi in esso, i trassi a 1'erba, tanta vergogna mi gravo la fronte. (30.76-78) My eyes fell down to the clear fount, but, seeing myself in it, I drew them back to the grass, so great shame weighed on my brow.

The double demurral effectively undoes Amant's career and qualifies the pilgrim as a "corrected Narcissus."59 In the censorious gloss of the Ovide moralise, the myth figures forth an infatuation with worldly beauty generally:

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Qui bien veult ceste fable aprendre, Par Narcisus puet Ten entendre Les folz musors de sens voidiez, Les orgueilleus, les sorcuidiez, Qui des biens temporeus abusent, Que se mirent et qui s'amusent, Aus faulz mireoirs de cest monde. (3-I9O3-9)60 Whoever wants to interpret this story well should understand by Narcissus those foolish idlers devoid of sense, the proud, the presumptuous, who misuse temporal goods, who see themselves and entertain themselves in the false mirrors of this world. Petrarch lists Narcissus in the Trionfi as one of Love's conquests — "un bel fior senza alcun frutto" (Triumphus Cupidinis 2.148; a lovely flower without any fruit) — but in the Canzoniere the character is named only in making an uncharacteristic reproach against Laura; she ignores Petrarch because she is so infatuated with what she sees in her mirror that the mirror in fact becomes his rival: II mio adversario in cui veder solete gli occhi vostri ch'Amore e '1 Ciel onora colle non sue bellezze v'innamora piu che 'n guisa mortal soavi et liete. Per consiglio di lui, Donna, m'avete scacciato del mio dolce albergo fora: misero esilio! avegna chV non fora d'abitar degno ove voi sola siete. Ma s'io v'era con saldi chiovi fisso, non dovea specchio farvi per mio danno a voi stessa piacendo aspra et superba. Certo, se vi rimembra di Narcisso, questo et quel corso ad un termino vanno — ben che di si bel fior sia indegna 1'erba. (45)61 My adversary in whom you are wont to see your eyes, which Love and Heaven honor, enamors you with beauties not his but sweet and happy beyond mortal guise. By his counsel, Lady, you have driven me out of my sweet dwelling: miserable exile! even though I may not be worthy to dwell where you alone are. But if I had been nailed there firmly, a mirror should not have made you, because you pleased yourself, harsh and proud to my harm. Certainly, if you remember Narcissus, this and that course [i.e., yours and his] lead to one goal — although the grass is unworthy of so lovely a flower. Mythologically, the identification of Laura with Narcissus is of a piece with Petrarch's identification of himself in Canzoniere 23 with Echo. Psychologi-

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cally, this diagnosis of her treatment of him strikingly anticipates — may even, by some path of historical causality, be said to have induced — a famous passage of Freud's: "Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object. Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to that of the man's love for them. Nor does their need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved. . . . The importance of this type of woman for the erotic life of mankind is to be rated very high. Such women have the greatest fascination for men."62 Laura is accused of being, in just about the modern sense of the term, a narcissist. This reproach proves a popular explanation in Renaissance literature for female unattainability: Disdaine and Scorne ride sparkling in her eies, Misprising what they looke on, and her wit Valewes it selfe so highly, that to her All matter els seemes weake: she cannot love, Nor take no shape nor project of affection, She is so selfe indeared. (Much Ado About Nothing 3.1/112.8-33)63

Yet like Actaeon's hounds, the diagnosis is primed to turn against its author. What Petrarch does not quite say other poets make explicit: Esser me cuid per moltes gents repres puis que tant llou viure en la vida trista, mais io qui he sa gloria a I'ull vista, desig sos mals puis delit he es promes. No es pot saber, menys de 1'experienc.a, lo gran delit que es en lo sols voler d'aquell qui es amador verdader e ama si veent-se en tal volenca. (Ausias March 39.33-40) I think I shall be reproached by many people for praising so highly the life of sadness, but I who have seen its glory with my own eyes desire its evils, since they promise pleasure. One cannot know, except by experience, the great pleasure which exists in the mere intention of him who is a true lover and loves himself for being of such a mind.64

On some level of generality the story of Narcissus can be a paradigm for almost any artistic activity, but the craft of the Canzoniere is committed in such specific and innovative ways to obscuring the difference between love and solipsism as to make it worth identifying as a new mode of narcissistic poetics. John Freccero, in an influential attempt to specify that poetics,65 de-

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fines Petrarch's novelty as the achievement of a kind of semiotic idolatry, whereby poetic language becomes deliberately auto-reflexive, enacting and affirming the poet's specular self-sufficiency: "For the laurel to be truly unique, it cannot mean anything: its referentiality must be neutralized if it is to remain the property of its creator. Petrarch makes of it the emblem of the mirror relationship Laura-Lauro, which is to say, the poetic lady created by the poet, who in turn creates him as poet laureate. This circularity forecloses all referentiality and in its self-contained dynamism resembles the inner life of the Trinity as the Church fathers imagined it. One could scarcely suppose a greater autonomy" (pp. 26-27). Laura is, at most, "a pure signifier whose momentary exteriority to the poet serves as an Archimedean point from which he can create himself" (p. 30). The immediate contrast is with Dante, whose allegorical signifier, in an Augustinian spirit, "stands for a tradition of textual anteriority that extends backward in time to the Logos" (p. 2.5). Petrarch secured his place in literary history by programmatically breaking with this aesthetic, in a spirit of possibly Bloomian rivalrousness; what he put in its place "remained for centuries the model for poetic self-creation even for poets who, in matters of form, thought of themselves as anti-Petrarchan" (p. 21). Freccero posits his thesis as in some sense opposed to "psychologizing" the Canzoniere — to do so "is to live the illusion that Petrarch was perhaps the first to create" (p. 31) — but the psychological dimension to the semiotic program is readily evident, and too many agendas intersect here to be easily sorted out or ranked. The Petrarchan laurel is an emblem on several levels for the effacement of external presences into a world of mirrors; we can indeed watch the very portrait of the narcissistic Laura evolve from an apparently similar reproach rooted in a different sense of reality: Be deuri' aucire qui anc fetz mirador! Can be m'o cossire, no*n ai guerrer peyor. Ja*l jorn qu'ela-s mire ni pens de sa valor, no serai jauzire de leis ni de s'amor. (Bernart de Ventadorn 38.41-48) I would have gladly murdered the man who first made the mirror. When I think about it, I don't have a worse enemy. The second she looks at herself and realizes how much she's worth, it won't be me who enjoys her or her love. (Goldin) Narcissus is not mentioned here — though, as we have seen, Bernart cites the myth elsewhere. What the mirror provides the woman is not a love object as

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such but a computation of her value; the poet fears not that she is taking herself off the market, but that she is upgrading her notions of where to sell, beyond the level at which he might hope to compete. The mirror is his adversary in a more metaphorical way than it is for Petrarch; other all-too-human suitors are waiting to fulfill that role in a literal sense. The closest thing to that kind of rivalrousness in the Canzoniere comes when Laura receives a ceremonial kiss from a visiting dignitary: "me empie d'invidia 1'atto dolce et strano" (2.38.14; "me his sweet strange act filled with envy" — this in the wake of one of Petrarch's rare expressions of overtly sexual longing in 237.31-36).66 In Occitan lyric, male competitiveness is a major factor, the stimulus for some memorable maneuvering: Domna, a prezen amat autrui, e me a celat, si qu'eu n'aya tot lo pro et el la bela razo. (Bernart de Ventadorn 2.5.57-60) Lady, in public love the other one, and me in private, so that I get all the good of it, and he the edifying conversation. (Goldin) Even when other lovers are not directly present, there is always the jealous husband, lo gilos, remembered at the very summit of erotic joy: Car la gensor que anc nasques de maire tenc et abras, per qu'eu non prezi gaire lo fol gilos ni 1'alba. (Giraut de Bornelh 54.33-35) For the most noble woman that ever was born of mother I hold and embrace; hence I heed not the jealous fool, nor the dawn. "The conclusion is inescapable that the love-song, with all its stately elegance, derived its power and significance ultimately from the proximity of the avenging horn."67 Laura's marital status, on the other hand, is less evident. Renaissance commentators debated the matter with some intensity. A reference in the Secretum to her pregnancies effectively settles the question, though only if you are reading the right recension;68 the father of her children, however, is almost wholly absent from the Canzoniere. We can suppose that he is the figure whose gelosia is mentioned in passing as one reason for her inaccessibility (196.6, 222..7). There may be a scornful reference to him as the senescent Tithonus in one development of the Laura/l'aurora pun. Quella ch'a neve il volto, oro i capelli, nel cui amor non fur mai inganni ne falli, destami al suon delli amorosi balli, pettinando al suo vecchio i bianchi velli. (2.19.5-8)

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She whose face is snow, whose hair is gold, in whose love was never any deceit or failing, awakens me with the sound of her amorous dance, combing the white fleece of her aged husband. But the allusion is compromised with the surprising specification that this is not a description of the real object of Petrarch's devotion: Cosi mi sveglio a salutar 1'aurora e '1 sol ch'e seco, et piu Paltro ond'io fui ne' primi anni abagliato, et son ancora. (9-11) Thus I awake to salute the dawn and the sun which is with her, and even more that other sun by which I was dazzled in my first years and am still. Scorn for a decrepit rival fades to distant innuendo.69 In the long run the firmest testimony to Laura's marital status is the consistent praise of her virtue as onesta or castita;70 the point becomes visible when Petrarch turns from her at the end of the sequence to praise of Mary, "Vergine unica et sola" (366.133). In its widest scope, the Petrarchan laurel may be said to enfold the momentous social drama of fin9 amors. The worship that the troubadours bestowed on their women was modeled on the devotion that a feudal vassal owed to his lord; the most popular term of erotic address was the hermaphroditic Midons, in which what appears to be the female possessive mi' was grafted onto the otherwise masculine word for master (mea dominus would be the Latin equivalent; mea dux actually occurs in the Carmina burana).71 Legend often makes the lady literally the wife of the singer's lord, but the significance of the idiom extends beyond specific narrative reference: this is love whose object has power over the lover's social standing. The novelty of Occitan love lyric is perhaps best located here; its stimulus is not some objective enhancement of the condition of women — much sought by scholars, difficult to document — but the fluid situation of a petty aristocracy exerting pressure on the stubborn hierarchy of aristocratic prestige.72 An appetite for such prestige confronting the hereditary constraints on its satisfaction issues in affirmations of a more personal, inward source of dignity: Terras pot horn laissar e son filh heretar, mas pretz non aura ja, si de son cor non 1'a. Paratge d'auta gen, poders d'aur ni d'argen no us daran ja bon pretz, si ric cor non avetz,

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Petrarch ric cor, sens desmezura, que d'autre non ai cura. (Arnaut de Marueil)73 A man can bequeath lands and his son can inherit them, but he will not have honor [pretz] if he does not have it from his heart Neither high-born rank nor the power of gold or silver will give you a good name [bon pretz] if you do not have a wealthy heart, a wealthy heart without unruliness, which has no other concern.

This pressure converts terms of social rank into attributes of individual character and emotion; applied to love, it reinvents the western love lyric: Quar per s'amor esper en pretz montar, ez en honor ez en gran manentia ez en gran gauch; doncx en als non deuria mos pessamens ni mos dezirs estar; que pus per lieys puesc tot, quan vuelh, aver, al sieu servir dey far tot mon poder. (Guiraut Riquier iy.9-14)74 Since through her love I hope to rise to merit [pretz], to honor, to great wealth and to great joy, I should not therefore set elsewhere my thoughts or my desires; and since through her I can have all I desire, I must in her service do all that is in my power. (Press) The key word pretz — best known in the doublet pretz e valor, but often functioning alone — is a protean term of personal valuation: Sel que es corns e dues e sera reis s'es mes enan, per qu'es sos pretz doblatz. Qu'el voll mais pretz c'om de lias doas leis, dels Crestians ni dels no-bateiatz. E c'el vol pretz, a las obras pareis; qu'el vol tant pretz e tant bon'aventura, per que sos pretz creis ades e meillura. Qu'el vol lo pretz del mal e*l pretz del ben, e vol tant pretz c'ambedos los rete. (Bertran de Born 36.io-i8)75 Modern English can scarcely keep up with the variations: He who is count and duke and will be king has stepped forward, and by that his worth [pretz] is doubled. He desires honor [pretz] more than any man of either religion, Christian or unbaptized. And it is clear from his deeds that he wants honor [pretz], for he seeks honor [pretz] and success so intently that his good name [pretz] continually grows and improves. He wants honor [pretz] from the evil and honor [pretz] from the good —he desires honor [pretz] so ardently that he embraces both.

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The different meanings here are at least unified by the context, which is the traditional field of action — political and military — of the feudal nobility (the future king is Richard Lionheart, and the occasion is the beginning of the third crusade). In all its potential translations, pretz invokes that dynamic of competitive excellence which is traditionally the code of such a nobility; it is very close to the TIUTI that dominates the passions of Homer's Achilles. What would astonish and baffle that character is the same term's widespread and uncasual use in love poetry: Amors es de Pretz la claus, e de Proesa us estancs don naisson tuich li bon fruich s'es qui leialmens los cuoilla. (Arnaut Daniel 11.9-12) Love is the key to Worthiness [Pretz], and is the stem of Excellence, from which are born all good fruits if there is one who loyally cultivates them. At times, pretz seems to be the reward of successful courtship and measures an elite happiness, but it also functions in the more common situation of despair: L'enans, que n'ay, m'es mout plazens e grans, qu'ieu non saupi penre ni far honor, ni negus faitz d'azaut no m'ac sabor, tro*m fes plazer amors, qu'ieu lieys ames, qu'ab mi no fon en lunh fag d'un acort, sal quar son pretz creysser dezira fort, que, s'ylh o vol, ieu atretant o vuelh. (Guiraut Riquier 17.8-14) The enhancement which I have thereby is to me most great and pleasing, for I knew not how to win or how to do honor, and no gracious deed appealed to me, until love made it please me that I should love her who was in no way of one accord with me, except that she greatly desires to increase her merit [pretz], for, as she wants it, so I want it just as much. (Press) Here, though the poet has learned much from his experience, pretz is not something bestowed by the woman but something that accrues to her, reckoned, it would seem, precisely by her ability to inspire unrequited devotion. Guiraut is not complaining about this transaction, but affirming it as a common goal: like Echo to her Narcissus, he loves the same thing she does.76 Yet those roles do not necessarily stay distinct: q'er am tant aut qe*l pes mi poia e-m tomba, mas qand m'albir cum es de pretz al som, mout m'en am mais, car anc 1'ausiei voler. (Arnaut Daniel 17.4-6)

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Petrarch For now I love so high the thought uplifts and plummets me; but when I think how she's at the summit of value [pretz], I love myself even more, for I ever dared to want her.

The force of mats is ambiguous: I love myself more than I used to? or more than I love her? In either case, private emotion, simply being what it is, is on the verge of inducing some expansive worldly gratification: c'aras sai ieu que mos cors e mos sens mi farant far, lor grat, richa conquesta. (7-8) so that now I know that my heart and my feelings will let me make, with their pleasure, a wealthy conquest.

Heterosexual desire is suffused with the language of social dignity, both replicating the values of a warrior aristocracy and psychologizing them into a new field of reference. Love in classical Greek and Latin poetry can be a joy, torment, comfort, obsession —is even spoken of as a battlefield — but it is never in quite this way an ambition in the fullest public sense of the term. It is this aspect of Occitan lyric, I think, that is more responsible than any classical precedent for Petrarch's insistent paralleling of Caesars and poets. His laurel is both a continuation and a new twist on the troubadour idiom of aristocratic valuation. That idiom persisted lineally into stilnovist lyric, and it still has power in the Canzoniere; Laura possesses "e '1 gran pregio e '1 valore" (215.7), an