SOURCE: Gordon Braden, "Love and Fame: The Petrarchan Career," in Pragmatism's Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis, edited by Joseph K. Smith and William Kerrigan, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp. 126-58.

[In the essay below, Braden bases his discussion of Petrarch's love poetry on Freud's ideas concerning "unconventional object choices."]

"The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own," Freud ventures in a late footnote to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, "no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object" (S.E. 7: 149). Those are not equal options; psychoanalysis aligns itself with the ancient wisdom: "Anyone who looks down with contempt upon psychoanalysis from a superior vantage-point should remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psycho-analysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato" (134). Understanding such Eros means undoing a major disposition of our culture: "We have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is.… It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object's attractions" (147-48). The immediate context here is the question of unconventional object choices, homosexual and other; but the real point is that any successful settlement of our sexual attention is going to be something of an effort, the result of a complicated process that has more to do with us than with the others who satisfy us or let us down—and that it is possible to be more lucid about this than Western culture since the end of antiquity has tended to be.

This chapter argues on behalf of Freud's historical generalization, which I think will take more weight than he asks it to carry; his graph of the course of Western moral thought tracks more than superficial standards of sexual behavior and taste. I end by corroborating, in a widened sense, Freud's alignment of psychoanalysis with the classical emphasis on the instinct over the object. But I also want to argue that the psychoanalytic critique of romantic love has important historical roots in the world that intervenes between the two paganisms, in a Christian moral tradition that is deeply involved in the very literature that I assume is on Freud's mind and that certainly does the most to legitimate the contrast he makes. There is nothing in classical literature comparable to the exaltation of woman that arises with the Troubadours of the Pays d'Oc in the twelfth century and is transmitted from them to the rest of Europe: to northern France and the Trouvères, to Germany and the Minnesänger, and to Italy and the stilnovisti. These poets sing, time and again, of the woman who is the decisive event in a man's life, whose arrival divides that life in two ("Incipit uita noua …"), who makes all other concerns trivial in comparison. Among the classical poets, Catullus adumbrates such an enthrallment, but he has other things—and other kinds of love—to write about, too. Freud is right to see the elevation of the feminine object into the alpha and omega of masculine desire as in some ways the special mark of postclassical Western culture. Yet the very origins of that hypostatization are also perceptibly troubled about just what is being so rapturously affirmed; some of the founding works of Western European lyric poetry testify to a distressed awareness that Freud might be right about the nature of love as well.

The significant figure, historically and otherwise, is Petrarch (1304-74), the inheritor of Provençal and stilnovist lyric who gives it the shape in which it becomes the dominant form for serious love poetry for the next three centuries. During the general European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is Petrarchan imitation that trains the lyric poets of the developing vernaculars: imitation Petrarchan in form—the sonnet, which owes its prominence among the wide repertoire of Italian verse forms to Petrarch's example—but also, and more surprisingly, Petrarchan in content. Italian, French, Spanish, English, German poets, and others, will recount, as though on their own experience, a love that in its general outlines and often in specific details mimics that presented in Petrarch's own Canzoniere, the sequence of lyrics about his love for the blond woman with black eyes (and eyebrows) whom he calls Laura. He saw her first during morning services in the Church of St. Claire in Avignon, April 6, 1327, and she took over his life:

I' vidi Amor che' begli occhi volgea
soave sì ch' ogni altra vista oscura
da indi in qua m'incominciò apparere.…

[I saw Love moving her lovely eyes so gently that every other sight from then on began to seem dark to me.…]

(Canzoniere 144.9-11, 1976)

His devotion remained constant and all-consuming; even her death from the plague twenty-one years later—at exactly the same hour and day of the year at which he first saw her—did not loosen her hold on him. Petrarch's inability to think of anything else ramifies through the Renaissance and beyond.

Yet if that becomes the great love story of its time, literary history has some explaining to do as to why it should have become so central. For it is a peculiar story, peculiarly told: a story, for one thing, in which virtually nothing happens. The preceding paraphrase includes almost all the clearly recoverable events, and some of those can be specified only from information available outside the poems. The surviving evidence of Petrarch's intense interest in the order of his 366 poems—there were several states of the collection, with much meticulous rearranging—sorts oddly with the modern impression that the poems could be read in almost any order (as they usually are: even scholars seldom read them straight through). The very point of the sequence's main event—Laura's death, announced in poem 267—is that it changes almost nothing. The situation Petrarch writes about is largely a static one, and at least ostensibly for a simple but important reason: Laura responds with implacable indifference, if not active hostility, to her lover's attention. In the face of this, he can muster few resources; what he most famously expresses is his despair. The fin amor celebrated by Petrarch's predecessors was itself characteristically unconsummated: "the concept of true love was not framed to include success" (Valency 1982, 160). Petrarch's extraordinary elongation of that frustration is echoed in almost all of the Canzoniere's Renaissance descendants, a run of masculine bad luck so insistent that it becomes almost a joke, a sign of Petrarchism's monotonous conventionality. But jokes have their reasons; and one may meditate on why the European lyric celebration of the feminine object of desire should begin with several centuries fixated on the unavailability of that object.

Petrarch himself for the most part attributes Laura's unresponsiveness to her virtuousness; tradition assumes (as in Provençal lyric) a husband (perhaps ambiguously referred to in 219), so that she is simply doing what Petrarch himself can admit is the correct thing: "veggio ch' ella / per lo migliore al mio desir contese," "I see it was for the best that she resisted my desire" (1976, 289.5-6). Later Petrarchists will be more willing to attack the woman's behavior as, in the usual accusation, cruelty: "Cruell fayre Love, I justly do complaine, / Of too much rigour, and they heart unkind" (Giles Fletcher the Elder 1964, Licia 44.1-2). The claim draws on Renaissance lore about female nature, in which cruelty was often listed as a characteristic flaw. Subtler thoughts on the matter, however, take us into an important area of psychoanalytic theory about erotic development; Freud's own delineation of "the type of female most frequently met with, which is probably the purest and truest one" (S.E. 14: 88), is a credible portrait of the Petrarchan mistress: "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" (88-89). What is happening makes sense because it is in fact a reversion to the original disposition of the libido, which in its first stages is invested not in any external presence, male or female, but in the self; and the spectacle of that reversion can be reveting: "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" (89). It is indeed the allure of their selfishness that may be said to exact the spectacular selflessness of their lovers' devotion, and the man's despair in the Petrarchan story overlays a profound congruence: he and his mistress both adore the same thing. Extreme object love is symbiotic with an extreme self-love that is if anything the more powerful force; the anaclitic lover is trained by the narcissistic beloved.

Which is in fact to use Petrarch's own language from one of the few significant reproaches he ever brings himself to make against Laura:

Il mio adversario in cui veder solete
gli occhi vostri ch' Amore e 'l Ciel onora
colle non sue bellezze v'innamora
più che 'n guisa mortal soavi et liete.

Per consiglio di lui, Donna, m'avete
scacciato del mio dolce albergo fora;
miserio esilio! avegna ch' i' 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 sì bel fior sia indegna l'erba.

[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 lead to one goal—although the grass is unworthy of so lovely a flower.]

(Canzoniere 1976, 45)

The flower is of course the narcissus, into which, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Greek youth is transformed at his death. The flower's appearance gives a grace to Narcissus's end, but his dying itself is a punishment inflicted by Nemesis for spurning the nymph Echo, who in rejection fades into the phenomenon that carries her name. In Ovid, Narcissus has an early disposition toward his fate—"in tenera tam dura superbia forma," "such harsh pride in that tender form" (1916, 3.354)—but he does not actually look into the fatal pool, does not become a narcissist, until after he has refused to love another. A minor adjustment of cause and effect allows Petrarch to make the myth into a telling version of his own relation to Laura: hypnotized self-absorption paired with tragic anaclisis. And in so doing he indeed gives the classical myth a remarkable approximation of what has become its modern meaning, to sound a sophisticated warning. Laura's indifference is hardly virtue, and worse than mere cruelty to him; it is a self-destructive perversion of her own capacity for love.

Putting it that way only slightly overstates the polemical force of psychoanalysis: "A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill" (Freud S.E. 14: 85). Secure object love is an important achievement of psychic health, likely for all its difficulties to be the most fortunate outcome for the individual, while secondary narcissism is a frequent—increasingly frequent—and proper target for therapeutic correction. Rorty … reminds us of Freud's larger sense, stated on several occasions, that the mission of psychoanalysis was to attack "the universal narcissism of men, their self-love" (Freud, S.E. 17:139). If, as Rorty argues, Freud has not entirely thought through his point here, that is in great part because of the august heritage behind such a stand: at least as much a moral as a scientific heritage, and one that in this regard Freud shares with Petrarch. Petrarch's own accusatory diagnosis of Laura's state draws on the late medieval mythography in which Narcissus's pride, superbia, became a matter of special interest: for pride is, in Christian thinking, not a mere character flaw but the most insidious of human sins.¹

Of all sins, pride is perhaps the cleverest in its disguises; Petrarch's philosophical writings brood on its capacity for, indeed, passing itself off as virtue (e.g., De remediis utriusque fortunae, book 1, chap. 10, in Petrarch 1554, 1:14-15). Instructing such wariness is the spirit of Augustine, who identified pride as the primal sin of the fall: "'Pride is the start of every kind of sin' [Ecclesiasticus 10.15]. And what is pride except a longing for a perverse kind of exaltation? For it is a perverse kind of exaltation to abandon the basis on which the mind should be firmly fixed, and to become, as it were, based on oneself, and so remain. This happens when a man is too pleased with himself" (City of God 1984, 14.13; see also Green 1949). In its original context, much of Augustine's polemic was aimed at the heroic values of classical pagan culture, a culture that, for all its sensitivity to the dangers of overreaching, was much less severe on self-regard and had no trouble praising autarceia as a goal. But the Empire had provided ample evidence of the civic and other dangers of such values, and Augustine spoke for a new ethical dispensation from which classical narcissism was to be uprooted: "The earthly city was created by selflove reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self" (City of God 1984, 14.28). Humility becomes a central standard, and the self's comfort must be understood as depending on something beyond its own borders; under Christian influence, the contrast between self-love and the love of others, Eros and agapê, becomes newly visible as a contrast of profoundly moral urgency.

Petrarch's application of that urgency to the matter of courtship accordingly informs some of the most compelling arguments in the tradition to follow:

Ach, Freundin, scheu der Götter Rache,
dass du dir nicht zu sehr gefällst,

dass Amor nicht einst deiner lache,
den du itzt höhnst und spöttlich hältst.
Dass, weil du nichts von mir wilst wissen,
ich nicht mit Echo lasse mich,
und du denn müssest mit Narzissen
selbst lieben und doch hassen dich.

[Ah, darling, avoid the gods' wrath; do not be too pleased with yourself, do not let Love, whom you now disdain and treat mockingly, some day laugh at you. Do not make me lose myself, like Echo, because you take no notice of me, and so make yourself, like Narcissus, love yourself and yet hate yourself]

(Oden 5.38.25-32, in Fleming 1965)

Addressing the threat of corrosive pride in the woman's resistance is not merely a seducer's ploy; it is nowhere more eloquently rendered than in the tradition's most adroitly Christian sequence:

Ne none so rich or wise, so strong or fayre,
but fayleth trusting on his owne
assurance:
and he that standeth on the hyghest
stayre
fals lowest: for on earth nought hath
enduraunce.
Why then doe ye proud fayre, misdeeme so
farre,
that to your selfe ye most assured arre.
(Spenset, Amoretti 1926, 58.9-14)

At least as embodied in poetry, however, the moral stand here comes with an acknowledgment of narcissism's indelibility; and what is, at best, in the offing is not a mere humbling of the woman. Other moral issues are still in play; even contaminated with pride, resistance to lust is a virtue, and the most sophisticated Petrarchan sequences trace a complicated response to the strength behind that resistance. The sonnet of Spenser's just quoted is immediately followed by a twin that praises something very close to what the first poem seems to attack:

Thrise happie she, that is so well assured
  Unto her selfe and setled so in hart:
  that nether will for better be allured,
  ne feard with worse to any chaunce to
    start
(Amoretti 1926, 59.1-4)

And Spenser's sequence is in fact moving toward a happy ending in marriage that allows us to say just what the telos of the Petrarchan love story actually is. Petrarch briefly adumbrates that telos in offering himself as the replacement for Laura's mirror; Spenser expands the hint:

Leave lady in your glasse of christall clene,
 Your goodly selfe for evermore to vew:
 and in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane,
 most lively lyke behold your semblant
  trew.
Within my hart, though hardly it can shew
 thing so divine to vew of earthly eye,
 the fayre Idea of your celestiall hew,
 and every part remaines immortally:
And were it not that through your cruelty,
 with sorrow dimmed and deformd it were:
 the goodly ymage of your visnomy,
 clearer then christall would therein appere.
But if your selfe in me ye playne will see,
 remove the cause by which your fayre
   beames darkned be.
(Amoretti 1926, 45)

The traditional reproach is there, yet the alternative being imagined is not a fundamental alteration of the woman's narcissism, but rather its incorporation into a cooperative endeavor. The lover's bid to replace the mirror in the lady's affections involves a promise to perform the function that his old adversary performs: she can continue to admire herself in the mirror of his admiration. This possibility is itself no more than the fundamental congruence of their situation; the chance for happiness lies in her capacity to acknowledge it and to trust her lover to live up to his role in it. That trust can, as it were, reconcile pride and dependence, and provide a basis for communion within which her self-absorption nevertheless has a privileged place. Milton's Eve follows a similar path. The Petrarchan drama of selfless devotion, in one of its dimensions, is actually a testing of the possible arrangements between narcissistic selfhood and the world around it.

The real truth of that proposition, however, takes us into darker territory, beyond the prospect of any familiar romantic success. If Spenser presents his lady as a narcissist, he offers Narcissus himself as a figure for the poet who loves her:

My hungry eyes through greedy covetize,
 still to behold the object of their paine,
 with no contentment can themselves
  suffize:
 but having pine and having not complaine.
For lacking it they cannot lyfe sustayne,
 and having it they gaze on it the more:
 in their amazement lyke Narcissus vaine
 whose eyes him starv'd: so plenty makes
  me poore.
(Amoretti 1926, 35.1-8; also Amoretti 83)

And the tradition of such references is a rich one, extending back beyond Petrarch:

Come Narcissi, in sua spera mirando,
s'inamorao, per ombra, a la fontana,
veggendo se medesimo pensando

ferissi il core e la sua mente vana,

gittovisi entro, per l'ombria pilgliando,
di quello amore lo prese morte strana;
ed io, vostra bieltate rimembrando,
l'ora ch'io vidi voi, donna sovrana,

inamorato sono sì feramente,
che, poi ch'io volglia non poria partire,
sì m'ha l'amor compreso strettamente.

Tormentami lo giorno e fa languire,
com'a Narcissi parami piagente,
veggendo voi, la morte sofferire.

[As Narcissus, gazing in his mirror, came to love through the shadow in the fountain, and, seeing himself in the midst of regretting—his heart and vain mind smitten—plunged in, to catch the shadow, and then strange death embraced him with that love, so I, remembering how beautiful you were when I saw you, sovereign lady, fall in love so wildly I could not, though I might want to, part from you, love holds me in its grip so tightly. Day torments me, draws off my strength, and, like Narcissus, to me it looks like pleasure, as I gaze on you, to suffer death.]

(Chiaro Davanzati, Sonetti 26, in Goldin 1973, 276-77²)

In particular instances one may be less sure than with the poems about the lady's mirror just how far the mythic reference is meant to reach; but cumulatively the examples make too much sense to ignore within a tradition where the beloved, for all one actually gets to see of her, might as well not exist.

An ongoing topos in discussion of Petrarchan poets has been to wonder if the lady in question was, actually, real; the questioning began in fact in Petrarch's own time, with his defensive insistence to Giacomo Colonna that Laura was not merely a literary character (Epistolae familiares, trans. Bernardo 1975-85, 2.9). Enlightened criticism has come to insist that the question is irrelevant to an appreciation of the poems themselves, but it is still impressive how systematically Petrarchan love poems, and especially the Canzoniere, veer away from direct encounter with a substantial presence. As a character, Laura is not called upon to do much work. Most of the poems in which she actually speaks to Petrarch come after her death, in dreams or visions; what few exchanges we have before that are ambiguous in their status:

Chinava a terra il bel guardo gentile
et tacendo dicea, come a me parve:
"Chi m'allontana il mio fedele amico?"

[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?"] (1976, 123.12-14)

The impression of comparative eventlessness in the Canzoniere is generated in great part by this overlay of interpretive subjectivity. Apparent events are seldom followed up; it is possible that this particular poem is answered not much later when the detection of Laura's goodwill turns out to be presumptuous:

Quella ch' amare et sofferir ne 'nsegna
e vol che 'l gran desio, l'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 piagne et
  trema;
ivi s'asconde et non appar più fore.

[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.]

(140.5-11)

Yet the rebuke is of a piece with the encouragement: Laura's anger "fra se stessa" is enough to send the lover fleeing (inward) in terror. Indeed, we are not sure his own aggression was anything more than a nuanced look; elsewhere we hear of his virtual inability to speak in Laura's presence:

Ben, si i' non erro, di pietate un raggio
scorgo fra 'l nubiloso altero ciglio,
che 'n parte rasserena il cor doglioso;

allor raccolgo l'alma, et poi ch' i' aggio
di scovrirle il mio mal preso consiglio,
tanto gli ò a dit che 'ncominciar non oso.

[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.]

(169.9-14)

The reality of that gleam of pity remains untested, and it should not surprise us to be told in the last poem in the sequence that Laura actually knew nothing of Petrarch's torment; his conviction that she would have refused him out of virtue is entangled with the likelihood that she was not even clearly challenged to do so:

  tale è terra et posto à in doglia
lo mio cor, che vivendo in pianto il tenne
et de mille miei mali un non sapea;
et per saperlo pur quel che n'avenne
fora avvenuto, ch' ogni altra sua voglia
era a me morte et a lei fama rea.

[one is now dust and makes my soul grieve who kept it, while alive, in weeping and of my thousand sufferings did not know one; 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.]

(366.92-97³)

It seems a fair guess that the lover's frustration is actually self-censorship, and that anything he has to say about his beloved's own state of mind is effectively preempted by his own actions and imaginings.

The general run of poems in the Canzoniere do not essay direct presentation of Laura at all. She shows up obliquely, sometimes through a fetishized object such as a veil or—a particularly influential detail—a glove (Mirollo 1984, 99-159). Most famously, she appears in the abstracted symbols for parts of her body that become the conventional decor by which later Petrarchan verse is most quickly recognized: "La testa or fino, et calda neve il volto, / ebeno i cigli, et gli occhi eran due stelle," "Her head was fine gold, her face warm snow, ebony her eyebrows, and her eyes two stars" (1976, 157.9-10). What is here spelled out is often the merest shorthand, as such metaphors take on a life of their own that can make Petrarch's poetry surreal and baffling at first encounter:

L'oro et le perle e i fior vermigli e i bianchi
che 'l verno devria far languidi et secchi
son per me acerbi et velenosi stecchi
ch' io provo per lo petto et per li fianchi.

[The gold and the pearls, and the red and white flowers that the winter should have made languid and dry, are for me sharp and poisonous thorns that I feel along my breast and my sides.]

(46.1-4)

A famous seventeenth-century portrait literalizing such conventions—the woman's eyes are suns, her teeth are pearls, her breasts are globes, with the lines of longitude visible on them—makes blatant, after long impatience, a grotesquerie implicit from the start (see the reproduction in Booth 1977, 453). The motifs do not converge but scatter into incongruent areas of metaphorical reference, and do as much to conceal or replace the woman as to present her. They are verbal fetishes, displacements of erotic intent away from its normal object; what they communicate is not the woman's beauty but the fierceness of the energy that fixes on it. They are only the appropriate mode of description for a poetry whose principal business is the hyperbolic dramatizing of the lover's reaction to his condition: "O passi sparsi, o pensier vaghi et pronti, / o tenace memoria, o fero ardore …," "O scattered steps, O yearning, ready thoughts, O tenacious memory, O savage ardor …" (161.1-2). The most important reason for Petrarch's ongoing haziness as to what, if anything, is actually happening is that his real interest is in a private intensity of response most memorable exactly for being able to swamp the lineaments of its particular occasion. This is not the least of the reasons for speaking of him as the first modern lyric poet.

Petrarch's response is, of course, primarily one of distress, yoked to strong feelings of helplessness; yet the distress has its rewards: "in tale stato / è dolce il pianto più ch' altri non crede," "in such a state weeping is sweeter than anyone knows" (1976, 130.7-8). And the most convincing and substantial passages of relief the Canzoniere provides the lover are not the brief moments when a favorable response is (probably) hallucinated from Laura herself, but come rather with a deeper plunge into alienation. The poet of incurable love is also the poet of actively sought solitude:

In una valle chiusa d'ogn' intorno,
ch'è refrigerio de' sospir miei lassi,
giunsi sol con Amor, pensoso et tardo;

ivi non donne ma fontane et sassi
et l'imagine trovo di quel giorno
che 'l pensier mio figura ovunque io
  sguardo.

[In a valley closed on all sides, which cools my weary sighs, I arrived alone with Love, full of care, and late; there I find not ladies but fountains and rocks and the image of that day which my thoughts image forth wherever I may glance.]

(116.9-14)

The cooling of the sighs afforded by such retreat from the object of desire is not a lessening of desire but quite the contrary: away from all human interference, that desire can exercise itself with a new freedom and ease, in the image that the mind can project onto the passive landscape. It is in just this mode that Petrarch can become his most rapturous:

   I' l'ò più volte (or chi fia che mi ''l
   creda?)
ne l'acqua chiara et sopra l'erba verde
veduto viva, et nel troncon d'un faggio
 e 'n bianca nube, sì fatta che Leda
avria ben detto che sua figlia perde
come stella che 'l sol copre col raggio;    et quanto in più selvaggio

loco mi trovo e 'n più deserto lido,
tanto più bella il mio pensier l'adombra.

[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.]

(129.40-48)

The woman's very distance (lontonanza) enables a heady sense of power on the lover's part, of the capacity of his own mind to transform or displace external reality. At its most cogently celebratory. Petrarchan love poetry can seem an exaltation less of the woman herself—"Whose presence, absence, absence presence is" (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 60.13)—than of the poet's own imagination.

An awareness of the deep connection between love and the imagination is one of Petrarch's most important legacies to the Renaissance. "Love lookes not with the eye, but with the minde" (Shakespeare, Mid-summer Night' s Dream 1968, 1.1.234); the lover's eye learns to see what he wants it to see:

   if it see the rud'st or gentlest sight,
The most sweet-favor or deformedst
 creature,
The mountaine, or the sea, the day, or
 night:
The Croe, or Dove, it shapes them to your
    feature.
 Incapable of more, repleat with you,
 My most true minde thus maketh m'eyne
 untrue.
(Shakespeare, Sonnets 113.9-14,
Ql emended, see Booth 1977, 374-75)

A major interpretation of Petrarchism is that its experience of frustrated enamorment is, properly handled, the first step into an autonomous mental reality. Erotic enlightenment begins when the absence of the presumed object of desire prompts the lover to replace it with a more secure one of his own making: "To escape the torment of this absence and to enjoy beauty without suffering, the Courtier, aided by reason, must turn his desire entirely away from the body and to beauty alone … and in his imagination give it a shape distinct from all matter; and thus make it loving and dear to his soul, and there enjoy it; and let him keep it with him day and night, in every time and place, without fear of ever losing it" (Castiglione 1959, 351). Loving the woman's image is better than loving the woman herself, on both practical and ontological grounds; and the effort of intellectual abstraction so provoked can lead the lover to the wisdom of a desire wholly independent of worldly objects, leaving his original beloved far behind: "Among such blessings the lover will find another much greater still, if he will make use of this love as a step by which to mount to a love far more sublime … he will no longer contemplate the particular beauty of one woman, but that universal beauty which adorns all bodies; and so, dazzled by this greater light, he will not concern himself with the lesser, and burning with a better flame, he will feel little esteem for what at first he so greatly prized" (352). Petrarchism, in such theorizing, intersects the arc of Neoplatonic philosophy, that great Renaissance recovery of "the Eros of the divine Plato" that nurtures so much of the period's glorification of artistic creativity.

Much of the power of that philosophy lies in its ability to guarantee that a withdrawal from external reality— "instead of going outside himself in thought … let him turn within himself, in order to contemplate that beauty which is seen by the eyes of the mind" (Castiglione 1959, 353)—can in fact give access to the true ground of that reality: "Just as from the particular beauty of one body [love] guides the soul to the universal beauty of all bodies, so in the highest stage of perfection beauty guides it from the particular intellect to the universal intellect" (354). What may be mistaken for self-absorption is in fact the truest route beyond the self. Extrapolated to those levels, however, Neoplatonism—to which Petrarch himself had no direct recourse—does not really give us the Canzoniere. Petrarch's own faith in his visions is never more than poignant:

    Ma mentre tener fiso
posso al primo pensier la mente vaga,
et mirar lei et obliar me stesso,
sento Amor sì da presso
che del suo proprio error l'alma s'appaga;
in tante parti et sì bella la veggio
che se l'error durasse, altro non cheggio.

[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.]

(1976, 129.33-39)

What the mind holds to is still, in the final analysis, an error; it can be argued that the true focus of the Canzoniere is not the erotic vision but its dispersal, when a less exalted but more realistic version of the poet's work than Neoplatonism tends to propagate makes its appearance:

Poi quando il vero sgombra
quel dolce error, pur lì medesmo assido
me freddo, pietra morta in pietra viva,
in guisa d'uom che pensi et pianga et
  scriva.

[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.]

(129.49-52)

A pun used elsewhere as well encrypts a signature— "me freddo, pietra": I, Francesco Petrarca—and the residue of the vision is a return to self in a toughened, newly frightening form, whose climactic activity is writing. And for all the torment that Laura seems to impose on him, Petrarch's most telling anguish comes with his consideration of what is involved in a poetic career of the sort he has set for himself.

That anguish is keyed to an even more momentous pun:

Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro
vidi più bianca et più fredda che neve
non percossa dal sol molti et molt'anni;
e 'l suo parlare e 'l bel viso et le chiome
mi piacquen sì ch' i' l' ò dinanzi agli occhi
ed avrò sempre ov' io sia in poggio o 'n
  riva.

[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.]

(1976, 30.1-6)

Laura the woman is never wholly separable from lauro, the laurel, the crown of poetic fame; and Petrarch's desire for the woman in Avignon grades into the desire for literary immortality. The mythic version of that transformation gives the Canzoniere—indeed, perhaps the whole of Petrarch's oeuvre—its master trope:

Apollo, s' ancor vive il bel desio
che t'infiammava a le tesaliche onde,
et se non ài l'amate chiome bionde,
volgendo gli anni, già poste in oblio,

dal pigro gelo et dal tempo aspro et rio
che dura quanto 'l tuo viso s'asconde
difendi or l'onorata et sacra fronde
ove tu prima et poi fu' invescato io.

[Apollo, if the sweet desire is still alive that inflamed you beside the Thessalian waves, and if you have not forgotten, with the turning of the years, those beloved blond locks; against the slow frost and the harsh and cruel time that lasts as long as your face in hidden, now defend the honored and holy leaves where you first and then I were limed.]

(34.1-8⁴)

Among the first of the famous stories in the Metamorphoses is that of Apollo's desire for the nymph Daphne, who by Cupid's design flees from him: "auctaque forma fuga est," writes Ovid (1916, 1.530), "her beauty was enhanced by her flight." On appeal to her father, the river-god Peneus, she is transformed into a laurel tree, and Apollo finds recompense for his sexual frustration in appropriating her leaves as his special insigne:

    "at, quoniam coniunx mea non potes
  esse,
arbor eris certe" dixit "mea! semper
  habebunt
te coma, te citharae, te nostrae, laure,
  pharetrae."

["Since you cannot be my wife, you will certainly be my tree," he said. "Forever will my hair, my lyres, my quivers carry you, laurel."]

(557-59)

Ovid goes on to rehearse the classical role of the laurel as the honor given to victorious Caesars, but the detail that interests Petrarch is the cithara. For him, Apollo is preeminently the god of poetry, and the laurel crown is most important as the one that certifies poetry as a potential source of public recognition at least as great as that accorded princes and generals: "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" (Wilkins 1955, 309). So Petrarch on the most momentous public occasion of his life: his own receipt of the laurel crown in 1341, on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, in a ceremony that he himself had done much to reestablish, after a millennial lapse ("non percossa dal sol molti et molt' anni"), as the centerpiece of the program that came to be known as humanism, the revival of classical literary culture as a field both of study and of new endeavor. Fueling that program is the promise of a classical style of heroic recognition—bona fama et gloria—achievable in the process, now by the exercise not merely of physical and political prowess but of intellectual capability as well. Opening onto that possibility, the pun in Laura's name is perhaps the strongest connection between the dazed obsessiveness of the Canzoniere and the agora of normal human business. Frustrated desire and professional success somehow belong together.

Even though (aside from one Mistress Bays in the mid-sixteenth century [Rollins 1966, 1:251-53]) the different names of later Petrarchan ladies cannot supply the same pun, the connection sustains itself throughout the tradition. Adoration of the woman is seldom far from an assertion of the immortalizing powers of the poetry written about her: "Then would I decke her head with glorious bayes, / and fill the world with her victorious prayse" (Spenser, Amoretti 1926, 29.13-14). The topos comes with many valences to fit local situations. The most straightforward rationalization for its persistence is that the loved one's resistance shows her worthy of praise (the mythographers take the myth of Daphne primarily as a celebration of virginity), and in this connection the lover's own posture can reach a special purity of selflessness: "No publike Glorie vainely I pursue, / All that I seeke, is to eternize you" (Drayton, Idea 1931-41, 47.13-14).

Yet the injection of this theme into the tradition also does more than perhaps anything else to queer such protestations; it is on just this point that the shifty politics of the situation declare themselves most obviously. The beloved ostensibly being immortalized is, in simple historical fact, almost invariably unknown, and even when known is not actually being made famous. Elizabeth Boyle (who?) is not famous; Edmund Spenser is. The author of the last lines quoted is also capable of being, to my mind, more honest:

    though in youth, my Youth untimely
  perish,
To keepe Thee from Oblivion and the Grave,
Ensuing Ages yet my Rimes shall cherish,
Where I intomb'd, my better part shall save;
And though this Earthly Body fade and die.
My Name shall mount upon Eternitie.
(Idea 44.9-14)

This is in a sense only fair, indeed an act of psychic health in making the best of a bad situation: the fulfillment sacrificed to the woman's indifference is recuperated in artistic achievement. One may even cheer the hint of revenge (in some writers more than that) in such a maneuver. But the most challenging intimation is the more duplicitous one that Petrarch reports was put to him by Colonna: "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" (Epistolae familiares, trans. Bernardo 1975-85, 2.9). The arrangement here posited in its crudest form fits in subtler ways as well with the poetry before us—"deh, ristate a veder quale è 'l mio male," "ah, stay to see what my suffering is" (Canzoniere 1976, 161.14)—and there are good reasons for thinking professional calculation not merely a compensatory response to erotic failure but its partner and even master from the first. The story of the ego's apparent impoverishment may itself be a strategy for its extraordinary enrichment.

It is accordingly not only or even primarily the Petrarchan mistress who lies open to the charge of superbia. Petrarch's Christian heritage is skillfully accusatory toward love such as his, and especially toward the involuted dynamics of the male imagination. An important tradition of late medieval moral thought makes much of the lover's immoderata cogitatio, in a way that can be related to deployment of the Narcissus myth in the age's love poetry. Erotic fascination is actually self-fascination, a sophisticated sin of idolatry that threatens to substitute the lover's own fantasizing for proper devotion to the true creator (Robertson 1962, 65-113; Freccero 1975). Petrarch assents to such language—"l'idolo mio scolpito in vivo lauro," "my idol carved in living laurel" (Canzoniere 1976, 30.27, on which see Durling 1971)—and adding the cult of literary fame (previously only hinted at; see Valency 1982, 95-96) to the thematics of courtly love gears with the accusation and gives it new power, a condemnatory force that outlasts many more transient aspects of Christian morality. Freud himself … felt that force in a quite personal way; unpagan anxiousness over a classical style of personal ambition pushes what little Freud has to say about fame, for all its obvious relevance to the theory of narcissim, into virtually the last of his writings. One may both confirm and extend that theory by listening to Petrarch's articulate fear for the state of his soul, a fear in which the sin of sexual desire is characteristically entangled with the sin of pride.

In his most directly personal work, the Latin prose dialogue De secreto conflictu curarum mearum, Petrarch invokes the very spirit of Augustine ("that other fiction of mine," as he puts it in the letter to Colonna) to interrogate and accuse him, in a scenario of scathing introspection about "the causes that inflate your mind with pride [superbis flatibus]" (1911, 55). The brief opens with superbia in some of its most obvious forms: "Will you perchance be taken in by your own good-looking face, and when you behold in the glass your smooth complexion and comely features are you minded to be smitten, entranced, charmed?" (54-55). Petrarch parries such attacks—"I will not deny that in the days of my youth I took some care to trim my head and to adorn my face; but the taste for that kind of thing has gone with my early years" (57)⁵—only to confront subtler diagnoses: "I cannot disguise from you one word in your discourse which to you may seem very humble, but to me seems full of pride and arrogance.… To depreciate others is a kind of pride more intolerable than to exalt oneself above one's due measure" (59). And the final chicane, of course, is from Laura to lauro: "As for your boasting that it is she who has made you thirst for glory, I pity your delusion, for I will prove to you that of all the burdens of your soul there is none more fatal than this" (124). A lengthy penultimate denunciation of Petrarch's lust leads to a final assault on his other desire: "Ambition still has too much hold on you. You seek too eagerly the praise of men, and to leave behind you an undying name.… I greatly fear lest this pursuit of a false immortality of fame may shut for you the way that leads to the true immortality of life" (165-66). "I freely confess it," says Petrarch (166), but the admission gains no purchase on the passion itself: "I am not ignorant that … it would be much safer for me to attend only to the care of my soul, to relinquish altogether every bypath and follow the straight path of the way to salvation. But I have not strength to resist that old bent for study altogether" (192). And there the dialogue ends, with a parting shot from Augustine: "uoluntatem impotentiam uocas," "what you call lack of strength is in fact your own doing." In petrarch's own divided understanding, the greatest impediment to his salvation is an insidiously complacent selfishness: "The story of Narcissus has no warning for you" (55).

The point rewards further meditation. Augustine's trajectory of accusation passes through what has, since the nineteenth century, seemed unexpectedly "modern" territory: "You are the victim of a terrible plague of the soul … which the moderns call accidie" (Petrarch 1911, 84; on the term, see Wenzel 1961). The uoluptas dolendi that in the Canzoniere is mainly focused on Laura is here abstracted and generalized:

While other passions attack me only in bouts … this one usually has invested me so closely that it clings to and tortures me for whole days and nights together. In such times I take no pleasure in the light of day, I see nothing, I am as one plunged in the darkness of hell itself, and seem to endure death in its most cruel form. But what one may call the climax of the misery is, that I so feed upon my tears and sufferings with a morbid attraction [atra quadam cum uoluptate] that I can only be rescued from it by main force and in despite of myself. (84-85).

The cryptic pleasurability of such suffering is one of the marks that for Freud distinguishes melancholia from grief; the nearest thing to an explanation that Petrarch himself can muster is his inability to mourn: "In my case there is no wound old enough for it to have been effaced and forgotten: my sufferings are all quite fresh, and if anything by chance were made better through time, Fortune has so soon redoubled her strokes that the open wound has never been perfectly healed over" (86-87). It is well within the spirit of the Secretum to adduce Freud's thesis that what is at work here is a narcissistic regression of an especially powerful sort, the active withdrawal of libido from an object-choice that was itself probably narcissistically based (Freud S.E. 14:249-50). Introjected disaffection with reality is a not altogether paradoxical strategy for denying transience and loss: "By taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction" (257). Petrarch's misery has its links to his drive for self-bestowed immortality.

One may accordingly expect the assertiveness that stirs even as Petrarch catalogues his unhappiness. The blame shifts perceptibly outward from himself to malicious fortune, and accidia—which Dante and Chaucer both linked with the sin of wrath⁶—passes into the resentment of unacknowledged virtue: "In the pushing and shameless manners of my time, what place is left for modesty, which men now call slackness or sloth?" (Petrarch 1911, 91). Augustine reminds Petrarch of his frequently professed scorn for popular opinion, and has it reaffirmed: "I care as much for what the crowd thinks of me as I care what I am thought of by the beasts of the field." "Well, then?" "What raises my spleen is that having, of all my contemporaries whom I know, the least exalted ambitions, not one of them has encountered so many difficulties as I have in the accomplishment of my desires" (91). Anyone exercising the second part of the Platonic soul should be on guard against claiming humility as his motivation (Braden 1985, 10 ff.). Augustine responds with some sensible remarks about realistic expectations and the control of anger ("first calm down the tumult of your imagination"— 104), but we may well consider the topic open until the subject of reputation comes up again and Petrarch is brought to acknowledge the actual reach of his ambition: "Now see what perversity is this! You let yourself be charmed with the applause of those whose conduct you abominate" (167-68). That is one of Augustine's most skillful thrusts: in dealing with his audience, the writer can find himself in a posture uncannily similar to that of the Petrarchan mistress toward her admirers.

Had Freud had more to say about fame, he might well have dwelt on the narcissistic convolutions of an artist's involvement with his public. It is certainly not hard to recognize Petrarch's case in psychoanalytically inspired critiques of the modern cult of celebrity: "Studies of personality disorders that occupy the border line between neurosis and psychosis . . depict a type of personality that ought to be immediately recognizable … to observers of the contemporary cultural scene: facile at managing the impressions he gives to others, ravenous for admiration but contemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it; unappeasably hungry for emotional experiences with which to fill an inner void; terrified of aging and death" (Lasch 1978, 38). The connection is not merely anachronistic; Petrarch was arguably the first major example of a seductively treacherous kind of literary celebrity. In his later years especially, his fame served him in a very immediate way as his ticket to prestigious but unstable accommodations in a series of northern Italian city-states; and his inner disequilibrium legitimately anticipates fuller experiences of the cost of life lived through a negotiable self-image. (Petrarch left his own polemics against the literary marketplace; their mixture of detachment and involvement is well discussed by Trinkaus 1979, 71-89.) Yet more august problematics loom as well. The isolation within which Petrarch locates himself with his scorn for those on whom he makes his impression manifests something inescapably narcissistic in the career of writing itself: an intersection, if you will, of the myth of Apollo and Daphne with that of Narcissus and Echo.⁷ Petrarch's own life and work invite us to reflect on the ways in which the literary enterprise, in particular, works to elide its real audience into one that is in some important dimension a figment of the writer's imagination.

Consider this. A writer, sitting alone, facing a blank sheet of paper, puts on that paper words that are the words of speech but are not being spoken, and translates into silence the gestures of speaking to someone who in all but the most peculiar circumstances is not there, but whose presence the writer nevertheless tries in some form to imagine. Similarly, when that writing is read, the writer ostensibly speaking is, in all but very special situations, not there—though one tends to say writers succeed to the extent that they can nevertheless make us feel their presence. Cutting in two the face-to-face encounter that speech (one assumes) originally developed to serve, the skill of writing traffics at both ends in absent presences; a simulacrum of speech, it diverts language from literal to fictive others whose existence depends on the operations of a solitary's fantasy. Most of the important human connections of Petrarch's life seem to have been so mediated, in an immense epistolary corpus that was itself carefully organized and revised with an eye on eventual publication. Within that corpus Petrarch made no firm distinction between actual and imagined recipients, almost filling one book with Herzog-like letters to Cicero, Seneca, Homer, and the like ("do give my greetings to Orpheus and Linus, Euripides and the others"—Epistolae familiares, trans. Bernardo 1975-85, 24.12); a prose autobiographical fragment is in the form of a letter to Posterity. Petrarch was quite attuned to writing as "an unyielding passion" of strange self-sufficiency, indifferent to any external reference: "Incredible as it may seem, I desire to write but I know not about what or to whom to write" (13.7). And on this level we may seek some of the most cogent reasons that Petrarch and his avatars should choose as their great literary theme the otherwise perplexing story of the tongue-tied lover devoted for years to a distant woman to whom he can barely bring himself to speak, and who scarcely deigns to answer him when he does. It is a story in which utterance fails systematically of its ostensible external goal, to double back on its originator.

Such a course is most overtly dramatized in one of Petrarch's most compelling but difficult poems—the longest of the Canzoniere, and at least in appearance the sequence's fullest piece of autobiographical narrative:

canterò com' io vissi in libertade
mentre Amor nel mio albergo a sdegno
   s'ebbe;
 poi seguirò sì come a lui ne 'ncrebbe
troppo altamente e che di ciò m'avenne,
di ch' io son fatto a molta gente esempio.

[I shall sing how then I lived in liberty while Love was scorned in my abode; then I shall pursue how that chagrined him too deeply, and what happened to me for that, by which I have become an example for many people.]

(1976, 23.5-9)

It is also the poem that presents the fullest narrative unfolding of the Laura-laurel pun, in a personalized retelling of Ovid. Yet it is a retelling with a strange twist:

     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 Donna
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.

[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.]

(32-40)

The lover himself becomes the laurel. His own previous refusal to love mythically identifies him with Daphne to some extent, but Laura does not become identified with Apollo in the process; rather, the lover becomes both pursuer and pursued:

  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 già lor corona.…

[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.… ]

(41-44)

The frightening unexpectedness of the result produces neither the satisfaction nor the resignation that Ovid's Daphne and Apollo respectively feel. Part of what makes Petrarch's poem so difficult is that, however catastrophic, the event is not decisive; the lover is merely beginning a series of wrenching metamorphoses, adapted with similar dark compression from Ovid. Having undergone the fate of Daphne, he swerves into the fate of Cygnus:

Né meno ancor m'agghiaccia
l'esser coverto poi di bianche piume
allor che folminato et morto giacque
il mio sperar che tropp' alto montava

et giamai poi la mia lingua non tacque
mentre poteo del suo cader maligno,
ond' io presi col suon color d'un cigno.

[Nor do I fear less for having been later covered with white feathers, when thunderstruck and dead lay my hope that was mounting too high … 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.]

(1976, 50-53, 58-60)

Presumably this myth figures some subsequent act of erotic aggression, obscure in the usual Petrarchan manner. The narrative event is less clear and less important than its role in intensifying the lover's poetic vocation: the failure of his presumption has loosed his tongue, given him his voice. Yet true to its origins, it is a special kind of voice:

  Così lungo l'amate rive andai,
che volendo parlar, cantava sempre,
mercé chiamando con estrania voce;
né mai in sì dolci o in sì soavi tempre
risonar seppi gli amorosi guai
che 'l cor s'umiliasse aspro et feroce.

[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.]

(Translation changed, 61-66)

Speech, which aims to persuade its addressee, is diverted into song, a use of language that may ravish with its beauty but makes nothing happen. In the events that follow, what one can recover most clearly is the woman's insistence on denying speech its usual purpose:

Questa che col mirar gli animi fura
m'aperse il petto el' cor prese con mano,
dicendo a me: "Di ciò non far parola."
Poi la rividi in altro abito sola,
tal ch' i' non la conobbi, o senso umano!
anzi le dissi 'l ver pien di paura;
ed ella ne l'usata sua figura
tosto tornando fecemi, oimè lasso!
d'un quasi vivo et sbigottito sasso.

[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." Later I saw her alone in another garment such that I did not know her, oh human sense! rather I told her the truth, full of fear, and she to her accustomed form quickly returning made me, alas, an almost living and terrified stone.]

(72-80)

Following the logic of this suppression, the poetic career becomes literary:

le vive voci m'erano interditte,
ond' io gridai con carta et con incostro:
"Non son mio, no; s' io moro il danno è
 vostro."

[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."]

(98-100)

"Interditte" and, in the previous line, "afflitte," take their rhyme, after a long postponement, from line 92: "scritte."

The agenda of that last word's appearance itself bears further thought. To speak in paper and ink is to speak con estrania voce, with an estranged voice that the speaker almost does not recognize as his own; the process of estrangement moves toward a complete split of speech and speaker:

    ancor poi ripregando i nervi et l'ossa
mi volse in dura selce, et così scossa
voce rimasi de l'antiche some,
chiamando Morte et lei sola per nome.

[when I prayed again, 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.]

(1976, 137-40)

The voice of his love is simultaneously the voice of death, the inverse of the interdicted vive voci. Again, there is an Ovidian text in the background, and perhaps the most readily Petrarchan of Ovid's stories: "tamen haeret amor crescitque dolore repulsae," "though rejected, her love sticks and grows with her grief" (Metamorphoses 1916, 3.395). The character in question—about to separate into petrified body and abstracted voice—is Echo; and her appearance points us toward the myth that is conspicuously not used in Petrarch's poem but that, as Durling has shown, is almost there in the recurring motifs of the myths that are: "With the exception of the Battus myth they take place near a body of water into which at least one of the characters gazes. With the exception of the Daphne myth they involve characters who are punished for something they have seen. All of them concern frustrated—or even disastrous—speech or writing, and in each case the speech involves deception or confusion or some question about the identity of one of the protagonists" (Petrarch 1976, 28). There are reasons (31-32) for suspecting that the story of Narcissus is about to come up around line 90, when, after some documentable trouble in the composition, Petrarch changes the subject, so: "più cose ne la mente scritte / vo trapassando," "I pass over many things written in my mind" (92-93). The absent presence written in the mind is credibly the myth that hovers over the whole poem like a guilty secret.

Remembering Narcissus at any rate allows us to track the movement between the poem's opening event and its impendingly violent end:

  I' segui' tanto avanti il mio desire
ch' un dì, cacciando sì com' io solea,
mi mossi, e quella fera bella et cruda
in una fonte ignuda
si stava, quando 'l sol più forte ardea.
Io perché d'altra vista non m'appago
stetti a mirarla, ond' ella ebbe vergogna
et per farne vendetta o per celarse
l'acqua nel viso co le man mi sparse.
Vero dirò; forse e' parrà 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.

[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.]

(1976,147-60)

The myth—from the same book of the Metamorphoses as that of Narcissus—is the story of the hunter Actaeon, who saw the goddess Diana bathing, and in punishment was turned into a stage, to be hunted and torn apart by his own dogs, whom he could not call off:

                         clamare libebat:
"Actaeon ego sum: dominum cognoscite
  uestrum!"
uerba animo desunt; resonat latratibus
  aether.

[He wanted to cry, "I am Actaeon! Know your master!" His words failed his spirit; the air resounded with barking.]

(3.229-31)

Durling attributes the story's appearance here to Petrarch's perception of it as "an inversion of the myth of Daphne. In one, it is the beloved who flees, in the other, the lover. In one, the end result is speech: poetry and fame; in the other, silence. In one, there is evergreen eternizing; in the other, dismemberment. 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" (Petrarch 1976, 28-29).

But the linkage is not only one of contrast. The story of Actaeon also parallels that of Daphne in Petrarch's alteration of the latter: at the end of the poem as at the beginning, the lover suddenly, catastrophically, becomes the object of his own pursuit. And if the concluding episode allows Laura to take uniquely unguarded, direct action, her motives are intentionally made uncertain—"per farne vendetta o per celarse"—while the verbs describing the metamorphosis become reflexive—"i' senti' trarmi"—as they move from the narrative past to the definitive present: "mi trasformo." The myth becomes a popular one in the tradition to come (Barkan 1980), where it is often moralized as a cautionary fable about the self-destructiveness of lust: "J'ay pour mes chiens l'ardeur & le jeune âge," "For my dogs I have passion and youth" (Ronsard 1966-70, Amours 1.120.7). Within Petrarch's own context, however, it intimates subtler but deeper terrors as a paradigm for the reflexive aggression of narcissistic melancholy; and the roaring that rises toward him at the end—"fuggo lo stormo"—supplies the climax to the trajectory of his estranged new voice. The barking of his hounds, I would argue, is the plaintive song whose development the canzone has narrated, returning to its now speechless creator.⁸ The terror on the other side of narcissistic beguilement—Freud locates it as the point at which melancholia becomes suicidal (S.E. 14:252)— is the experience of one's own self as the other, the outsider. The lover in Petrarch's poem flees from the sound of his own poetic voice, echoing murderously inside the bell jar.

That horrific climax is one of the reaches of Petrarch's moral self-arraignment, its mythic subtlety—I have tried to show—answerable to a coincidence of Christianity and psychoanalysis in their understanding of what the self is up to in its dealings with the world, and of the dangerousness of its way. Yet a final turn still awaits us; Petrarch's poem itself is not over, and what follows is not entirely the obvious conclusion:

né per nova figura il primo alloro
seppi lassar, ché pur la sua dolce ombra
ogni men bel piacer del cor mi sgombra.

[nor for any new shape could I leave the first laurel, for still its sweet shade turns away from my heart any less beautiful pleasure.]

(1976,167-69)

The allure of the deadly object is suavely reaffirmed, almost as if the lover had learned nothing at all; we might almost wonder if Petrarch is tacking on a commiato written for another, less relentless poem. There is, nevertheless, a continuity of action if not of tone in the sustaining of the present tense, as if to insist on the tenacity of the state to which the lover has come. No mere terror is going to change things. And a further twist to Petrarch's moral thought unfurls in his poem's final disjunction, which has its own meaning within the context of his life and work as a whole. We are led back once more to the standoff at the end of the Secretum.

The irresolution there is felt with particular acuteness because of the counterexample provided by Augustine himself: "A deep meditation at last showed me the root of all my misery and made it plain before my eyes. And then my will after that became fully changed, and my weakness also was changed in that same moment to power, and by a marvellous and most blessed alteration I was transformed instantly and made another man, another Augustine altogether" (1911, 19-20). By the standard set in Augustine's Confessions (which, he goes on to say, I'm sure you've read) Petrarch's self-scrutiny ought to be leading to a summary transformation of the personality, whereby self-love is replaced by the love of God with a definitiveness answerable to that first, profane enamorment. The Canzoniere eventually seeks to give appropriate form to such expectations with a renunciation of Laura and a hymn to the Virgin Mary: at last the suitable object, love for which will not be a screen for something base. Such a prospect lodges in the tradition as in some ways the proper end to the story ("Leave me ô Love, which reachest but to dust …"—Sidney 1962, Certain Sonnets 32.1), and the biographical tradition on Petrarch has sought for a major change of life around the time of the Secretum. There are those who claim to have found it (Tatham 1925-26, 2:277ff.). Yet the evidence is inevitably shifty and a bit wishful, subject to varying interpretation; and among the least uncertain facts is that, whatever Petrarch did or did not purge from his soul, the desiderium gloriae stayed with him (Baron 1971). In the specifically literary terms with which the Secretum finally hardens its conflict, Petrarch's indecisiveness endured almost to the very end; one of the last letters puts by Boccaccio's plea that Petrarch ease up on his studies: "I do hope that death may find me reading or writing, or, if it should so please Christ, in tearful prayer" (Epistolae seniles, book 17, epistle 2, in Wilkins 1959, 248). Scholars now find it credible to read Petrarch's story as a "lifelong wait" for a repeatedly deferred Augustinian conversion, colored by "his growing fear, his growing realization that the miracle of will and grace was not to be vouchsafed him" (Greene 1968, 247).

Learning to live with that realization brings hints of a shift in ethical standards. Greene senses a reaching back behind the Christian dispensation: "Insofar as [Petrarch's] psychology came to focus on the soul's instability without any opening to the divine, he recalls not so much Augustine as those pagan moralists who had earlier recognized the volatility of passion" (1968, 247)—who had, in other words, recognized that desire is intractably prior to its object (Greene is thinking specifically of Horace, Epistolae 1.l.90ff.). And one may, to at least some extent, place Petrarch as a moralist within what Freud, as described in the opening lines of this chapter, delineated as the pre-Christian dimension of psychoanalysis. We are certainly at the point where the intersection of Freud and Augustine ends; for the psychoanalyst as for the virtuous pagan, the ultimate external object of desire that would unclasp us from our specific individuality does not exist, except in our own imagination. This is not to say that such imagining will not be good for us, even essential; but the narcissistic roots of love are never simply extirpated, and the real comfort and obligation toward which we strive is not transcendence but clearheadedness as to what we are doing. The Secretum has occasionally been likened in passing to a series of psychoanalytic sessions, and the analogy can be made fairly specific. Petrarch's positive act is as it were to accept Augustine's diagnosis while avoiding its transcendental imperative, and with that the apparent indecisiveness becomes more clearly a therapeutic achievement. Voluntatem impotentiam uocas: as the speakers find their way to the topic of Petrarch's literary career, they move toward a disclosure of the calculation within what had presented itself as mere helplessness, the psychic purpose behind consequences previously disowned. From such a point we would now extrapolate not successful or failed conversion, but a lifelong conversation with the secret logic of an intimate stranger.

Notes

1. See Petrarch's own austere formulation: "Piacere sibi superbire est," "to be pleased with oneself is to be prideful" (De remediis utriusque fortunae, book 1, chap. 13, in Petrarch 1554, 1:17). The fullest source on the mythography of Narcissus is Vinge 1967; I have tried to respect her caution about overconflating the mythological character and the psychoanalytic concept, but want to argue here for serious continuity of meaning between the two, at least as mediated by Christian moral interpretation. My general perspective in this regard is close to that of Zweig 1980. Zweig also has some acute things to say on the not quite mastered complexities of the Christian position: in being linked to the promise of individual immortality, the ideal of selfless love is really inseparable from its proclaimed opposite, and keeps nourishing its own heresy. For my own purposes, I take Christianity pretty much at its word, but the deconstructive force of its critique of Petrarchan love potentially rebounds against the religion itself.
2. I choose an Italian sonnet for effect, but the trope is already well established (and just as startling) among the Troubadours. See Vinge 1967, 66-72; Zweig 1980, 85-99; and, at great length, Goldin 1967.
3. An alternative conclusion is, to be sure, imagined in Petrarch's Trionfi, his other major work in vernacular poetry, where the spirit of Laura informs him that she not only knew of his love but fully returned it, keeping quiet for the good of both their souls (Triumphus mortis 2.76 ff., see Bernardo 1974, 123-27). The dream-vision frame keeps the status of this revelation, at least by the standards of the Canzoniere, uncertain.
4. This particular poem originally stood first in the collection. On Petrarch's developing involvement with the story, the fullest discussion is still Calcaterra (1942); see especially 35-87. On Daphne's general mythographic history (and the innovative character of Petrarch's role in it), see Stechow (1965) and Giraud (1968).
5. Those early years are more fully described in a letter to Petrarch's brother Gherardo: "What should I say about the curling irons and the care we took of our hair? How often did the resulting pain interrupt our sleep" (Epistolae familiares, trans. Bernardo 1975-85, 10.3). The claim in the Secretum to have outgrown such things has on inspection an odd spin. Petrarch twice identifies himself in this connection with the psychopathic, prematurely gray emperor Domitian (57, 154), and insists that his own fading hair color provides him moral instruction as a memento mori. There is good reason to credit Petrarch's obsession with that change, which is a recurring topic in the Canzoniere— "Dentro pur foco et for candida neve, / sol con questi pensier, con altre chiome," "Inwardly fire, though outwardly white snow, alone with these thoughts, with changed locks" (30.31-32)—but of course you only stay aware of your hair color if you check the mirror regularly.
6. Dante, Inferno 7.100-26 (on which see Wenzel 1967, 200-2); Chaucer, The Parson's Tale: "Envye and Ire maken bitternesse in herte, which bitternesse is mooder of Accidie" (1957, 249).
7. There are visible if not fully articulated signs of contamination between the two stories in late medieval mythography. Several commentators—including Petrarch's friend Boccaccio—allegorize Echo as bona fama (Vinge 1967, 73-76, 102-04); and a twelfth-century French Narcisse replaces Echo by "Dané," that is, Daphne (Thiry-Stassin 1978).
8. Kilmer's translation is felicitous: "I can hear the dogs while I write this" (Petrarch 1981).