SOURCE: Mariann Sanders Regan, "Petrarch," in Love Words: The Self and the Text in Medieval and Renaissance Poetry, Cornell, 1982, pp. 184-222.

[In the following excerpt, Regan focuses on themes of love and self-examination in her reading of the Rime sparse.]

et perché 'l mio martir non giunga a riva,
mille volte il dì moro et mille nasco,
tanto da la salute mia son lunge.¹

We cannot intuit Lover infans in Petrarch's Canzoniere so easily or directly as we can in the lyrics by Dante and Arnaut Daniel. For through the metaphoric language of fusion, an illumined dyad sustains Daniel's poems, and a central presencing event rests at the heart of Dante's poetry; by contrast, in none of Petrarch's various works do Poet and Lover move harmoniously, in continual metaphors of fusion, toward some central arrheton, Rather, in these poems Poet and Lover join in more difficult, defensive verbal efforts, as though in reaction to an inadequate or finally unavailable Source. This "as though"—this pervasive sense of untrustworthy central Source and conflicted central infans—may serve as our beginning intuition for Petrarch's poetry. The lyrics of the Canzoniere may be understood as works of self-texturing appropriate to this uncertain ontological center.

In all of Petrarch's works, final values are never quite final. Final judgments can be postponed, or retracted. When Reason receives the Poet-Lover's appeal for justice late in the Canzoniere, she replies that she needs more time to make up her mind (360. 157).

Augustine, who often seems the winner in the debates of the Secretum, does not really have the last word. Laura is all but obliterated in the palinode, "Vergine bella" (366), but she is there again at the close of the Trionfo dell'Eternità, with those who possess immortal beauty and eternal fame. Perhaps such shifting purposes argue an uneasy ontology for these poems, an inability to fix Source and goal, an inherent restlessness. We recall how the Petrarch of the letters perceived his "wandering life" to have begun at birth:

But I was conceived in exile and born in exile. I cost my mother such labor and struggle that for a long time the midwives and physicians thought her dead. Thus I began to know danger even before I was born, and I crossed the threshold of life under the loom of death.… I was removed [from Arezzo] in my seventh month and borne all over Tuscany by a certain sturdy youth; as Metabus did Camilla, he wrapped me in a linen cloth suspended from a knotty stick, to protect my tender body from contact. In fording the Arno, his horse fell, and in trying to save his precious burden he nearly lost his own life in the raging stream.

After the wanderings in Tuscany we went to Pisa. I was removed from there in my seventh year and transported by sea to France. We were shipwrecked by the winter storms not far from Marseilles, and I was nearly carried off again on the threshold of my young life.… Thenceforward, certainly, I have hardly had a chance to stand still and get my breath.²

As a young boy, he says, he sensed as "true and almost present" those passages from classical authors about the mutability of life and "time's irrecoverability" (Fam. XXIV. 1, p. 201). He was barely in his teens when his mother died, and during those same years his father threw Petrarch's cherished library of classical books into the fire.³ The Petrarch of the letters would see such incidents as further evidence that "there is no resting-place for me," that he must lie exhausted on the bed of this life (Fam. XV. 4, p. 135). He was forever unable or reluctant to find a permanent residence, as though a final sense of belonging, or home, eluded him. For to be by one's very nature deracinated, or homeless, is to lack that definite imagination, that crucial absent presence, at one's psychic center: it is not a question of geography, but of how surely one possesses an intrapsychic representation of self-as-Source, toward which one internally is always directed, always "traveling." Without this sure imagination, in Petrarchan texturing, one can hardly even conceive of arriving home. Source becomes entirely contingent, a central ground that may always be pulled away. And indeed no ground seems to be truly secure in these letters; even though Gherardo has reached spiritual harbor in a Carthusian monastery, Petrarch nevertheless sends him exhortations to piety, as well as a reading list (Fam. X. 3, p. 100). No metaphors of suckling infants belong to this texturing; rather, one exists as though wrapped in a linen cloth and suspended from a knotty stick.

We sense in Petrarch's Canzoniere and in his other works a central infans moved by the full force of both those original contradictory motions, the dread of Void as well as the longing for Source. It is as though this Poet-Lover lives in the interchange of death and birth: "mille volte il dì moro et mille nasco." For the evocations of Source here are centrally threatened, and any Source that might be intuited from these pages seems to be always already departing. For instance, Laura is typically a shadow, an elusive ombra, even in her surest representations. Whereas the donna of Donte's nove rime approaches and brings life with her gaze, making her presence felt, it is of Laura's essence to vanish, to be summoned only with weeping and imaginative effort. And so in morte: Laura as salvific vision, guida al cielo, simply does not work as well as Dante's Beatrice. Her eyes do not show the Poet-Lover "la via ch'al ciel conduce" (the way that leads to heaven, 72. 3), despite all intentions. Instead of guiding him step by step to a consummate "fulgore," Laura repeatedly appears and disappears from his bedside: her tender counsel is intermittent, ephemeral—as her memory has always been. And her presence is swept away in the last poems where she becomes merely "tale" (one, 366. 92).

Moreover, except for those tenuous nightly visitations, the Poet-Lover of the Canzoniere receives no grace, no responsive, infinite Maternal Source, no presencing or represencing to strengthen his repentance and hope for salute. Neither Laura's arms nor God's arms reach down to him in his lifelong wanderings; neither Laura's face nor God's face approaches to bring him definitive rest. One might ask, as Lucia asks Beatrice at the start of the Inferno, do you not hear his cries? Such repentant moments as "Padre del Ciel" (62) and "I' vo pensando" (264) move on unanswered, and the Virgin's exhorted presence subtends the final poem silently. The Poet-Lover's final prayers move full cricle to the first poem in the sequence, where pietà and perdono are left to the reader in an unresolvable appeal. This first poem presents the whole sequence as an endless purgatorial chain, but without final absolution and remission of sins. There is no context that assures a sympathetic audience: it is Laura's role not to listen, of course (223), but there is no sense through the verbal texture that God and the Virgin Mary are listening, either. The poems revolve essentially alone, filling the silences left by their own failing pleas. For in Petrarchan texturing, such Dantean echoes as "il ver tacito" (the silent truth, 309) do not really allay the fear that there may be no truth, no trusted listening figure, in the silence. The pilgrim of the Commedia can experience nourishing silences, long gazes that lead to the final eternal gazing—but the Canzoniere does not evoke such a "silent terminal point"⁴ to engender and direct the words. The Poet-Lover must himself fill the silences, while no responsive presences arrive to lead him home. He calls Laura's name into a Void:

                   … onde con gravi accenti
è ancor chi chiami, et non è chi responda.
[318]

(… whence there is one who calls out with heavy accents, but there is no one to answer.)

The silence that is death shares the maternity of these poems.

In response and reaction to an untrustworthy central Source and a fully conflicted central infans, Poet and Lover meet in difficult textures, where often pain and solitude seem elaborated almost purposefully, willfully, self-consciously, dramatically. Or, one might say, defensively. For through several intricate verbal means that resemble defenses, Poet and Lover join as though to guard uncertain Source, or even to reclaim Source from all uncertainty. Like many defensive efforts, these do not work very well, but the efforts remain to mark Petrarchan texturing. In the cause of these defenses, whole human presences seem deliberately distanced from these poems, while at the same time parts of cherished presences seem to be assimilated, possessed in words. Moreover, the Poet-Lover works hard to turn against himself, in distinctive representations of amant martyr, so that the rages of incompleted mourning are deflected away from Source and into the verbal texture. Source remains uncertain, but finally, through the verbal negations and deviations of these pervasive defenses, Poet takes on weight—becoming perhaps strong enough to subsume, nourish, and compensate Lover for the centrally inadequate Source that provoked the defenses in the first place. Strengthened by Poet, the Poet-Lover may come to love self, his own being-in-words, almost as he would have loved a securely evoked Source. The expectations and problems of this self-love may lead us to the final self-consciousness of the Canzoniere, the Petrarchan "lifelong condition"⁵ that we all in some measure share with these poems as equivalent selves.

It may seem paradoxical that Poet and Lover would move together in purposeful defense to distance important presences from these poems, since intimations of a departing Source can be centrally threatening to the self. But such distancing can allow a crucial, saving measure of defensive control against a Maternal Source felt to be untrustworthy. For if that Source seems by its nature to vanish, the self can defensively take as its own the act of distancing, in order the more surely to circumscribe and hold the imagination of Source, absent presence, internalized "ideal object." The self contrives its own "optimal distance" from Source, defensively appropriating its own boundaries. And on the other hand, if Source seems by its nature to be overbearing or overpresencing, such managed distancing can be all the more a saving grace, can allow the self to exist in division. For there are some indications in Petrarchan texts that their evoked always-departing Source may operate, on a deeper level of defense, to screen the opposite evocation: an all-engulfing Source. And in this case, the self through the defense of primal envy would tend to devalue and distance important presences, lest they become entirely overwhelming. Thus ultimately, at some evocative level past the signifiers, that central untrustworthy Source in Petrarchan textures may be too near as well as too far, engulfing as well as abandoning, and these two untrustworthy "imagos" may be always oscillating in mutual reaction to each other. From such a conflicted "core" infans, the self would surely move to impose its own distances.

For instance, in an early canzone of the Canzoniere, "Una donna più bella" (119), the figure of Glory may suggest a Source both too far away and too near, and some ambivalence may inform the Poet-Lover's reception of her. When she leaves, she winds the garland of laurel around his temples as though to soften her departure: "'Non temer ch' i' mi allontani" (Do not be afraid that I am going away, 119. 102-5). Formulating this distance from her, the laureled self is discovered; Petrarch is crowned as poet laureate. On the other hand, when several lines earlier, after she presences him with her gaze (88-90), she tells him, "ciascuna di noi due [Virtue and Glory] nacque immortale" (each of us was born immortal, 119. 92), she seems intent to overwhelm him, to provoke his despair.

"Miseri, a voi che vale?
Me' v'era che da noi fosse il defetto"
[93-94]

("Wretches, what does it avail you? It would be better for you that we did not exist.")

Her exclamation here is like the proverb near the close of the Trionfo del Tempo: blessed is he who is not born. For he wanes in comparison with her; he can hope at best, through Glory, to live a long time (14-15), but she is overbearingly immortal.

These allusions to literary fame, and to an age without Virtue or Glory, recall certain similar passages in the letters, mixed evocations of abandonment and engulfment by Source, with appropriate defensive distancing. For in the letters also, Petrarch suggests that none of his contemporaries are worthy of Glory, or indeed worth reading, and that for this reason "I exert all my mental powers to flee contemporaries and seek out the men of the past" (Fam. VI. 4, p. 68). Bergin offers a more defensive cause for this flight—that Petrarch might have found true rivals among his contemporaries, especially those in Florence. Perhaps the Petrarch of the letters would like to hold his literary sources at a comfortable distance, to devalue those that are not already distanced by time. Such devaluing and distancing could manifest a primal envy of Source, an anxiety of influence. And as for those writers already safely distanced by time, not to mention by language and culture, he could continue to lament their irrevocable departure, taking them—from a distance—to heart. Petrarch, unable to read Greek, could clasp a volume of Homer to his bosom and sigh, "'O great man, how gladly would I hear you speak!'" (Fam. XVIII. 2, p. 153). Yet by contrast he could not bring himself to hold so close a copy of Dante's works: "I was strangely indifferent to this one book, which was new and easily procurable.… I was afraid that if I should immerse myself in his words, or in those of any other man, I might unwillingly or unconsciously become an imitator. (At that age one is so malleable, so prone to admire everything!)" (Fam. XXI. 15, pp. 178-79). Thus even while he carefully explains why he could never hate or envy Dante, the Petrarch of this letter is busy with primal defensive texturing, minimizing Dante's achievements and setting himself at a distance, clearly apart, lest he be immersed, shaped, overborne by a contemporary literary presence.

Perhaps the same defensive patterns inform Petrarch's tendency to avoid close or intimate associations, as well as fixed duties or responsibilities. As Bergin says, "with an art more instinctive than calculated, he managed to keep himself ultimately uncommitted." For example, when he was offered a Papal secretaryship in Avignon, he contrived to disqualify himself.⁶ He believed that his own father had been prevented from rising "high in the scholarly world" by the burdens of a job and family (Sen. XVI. 1, p. 292), and perhaps in consequence he avoided both; yet he also claims that his ability to reject long hopes—a "natural weakness, or natural soundness"—has saved him "from marriage and from others of life's troubles" (Fam. XXIV. 1, p. 201). One leaves, perhaps, before one can be either engulfed or abandoned. And the Petrarch of the letters refuses not only job and family but also a permanent home: he keeps up his travels and changes residence almost incessantly, never becoming definitively "at home," not even in his favorite Vaucluse. He will not belong to a community of close friends, although he several times professes his desire to do so, as when he writes to Guido Sette, "You must know that I never look at pleasant places without recalling my own country home and the friends with whom, God willing, I should most gladly pass there the remnants of my brief life" (Fam. XVII. 5, p. 152). He will not choose any city, such as Florence, upon which he might have some claim as "home." His life has often been called a "voluntary exile," and contrasted with Dante's involuntary exile. He cannot explain his "wanderings," which bring him by his own account more trouble than profit, except to say: "If I should be asked why then I do not stand still, I can only respond … I don't know why" (Sen. IX. 2, p. 260). Perhaps this continual interchange, along with the yearning for the solitary life, helps to preserve the circumference of the self: one keeps home and friends at a safer distance this way, and all evocations of dangerous Source in balance. When Petrarch invites a friend to live with him, he assures him, as he would probably himself like to be assured: "Don't think I am proposing to shackle you, or that you would be confined to a single house" (Fam. VIII. 5, p. 71).

The letters may provide a clarifying context, then, for the defensive texturing of the Canzoniere, where Poet and Lover join to distance all intact human presences from the words. After that "primiero assalto" (first assault, 2), Laura is dramatized only as a vanishing presence, so that the Poet-Lover seldom risks encountering her; moreover, few other whole presences— such as, for instance, the consoling ladies of Dante's "Donna pietosa"—are summoned by these poems. Only the distant invocations of apostrophe really belong to these lyrics; even substantial personifications, such as Glory (119) or Reason (360), are exceptional here. Safe from presencing or represencing events, the Poet-Lover can reflect upon his elusive l'aura. As Budel says of this distance willingly sought, "in the final analysis, he did not want what he seemed to want."⁷ As he wanders "Solo e pensoso" in "i più deserti campi" (Alone and filled with care … [in] the most deserted fields, 35), he resembles the Poet-Lover of Arnaut's "En cest sonet," intent to create himself "en desert."… For at this perpetual distance, he seems to invoke Laura's absent presence almost at will, while the landscapes (unlike Dante's) yield their inherent significance to serve as a backdrop for his well-controlled intimations of Source:

   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.
[129. 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.)

Because she is not there, he can take charge almost entirely of her image, its appearance and disappearance: he "designs" her. And he nourishes himself with this kind of "error," keeps himself symbiotically alive through this absent presence he has worked through distancing to create (129. 37-39; 127. 102-6). Perhaps such brief but distinctive metaphors of fusion, Lover with Poet, are enabled by the defensive distancing.

For he will distance her in time as well as in space. He envisions a future "benedetto giorno" (blessed day, 126. 31) when she would weep at his graveside, and he ranges "ne la memoria" (in memory, 41) to design a spellbinding image:

  Così carco d'oblio
il divin portamento
e  'l volto e le parole e 'l dolce riso
m'aveano, et sí diviso
da l'imagine vera,
ch' i' dicea sospirando:
"Qui come venn' io o quando?"
credendo esser in ciel, non lá dov' era.
[126. 56-63]

(Her divine bearing and her face and her words and her sweet smile had so laden me with forgetfulness
and so divided me from the true image, that I was sighing: "How did I come here and when?" thinking I was in Heaven, not there where I was.)

Here again is the language of fusion: Poet-Lover and poem seem almost to disappear into a carefully removed, imaged Presence. He creates his own trance, fixing and directing his memory until it can "mirar lei et obliar me stesso" (look at her and forget myself, 129. 35). Even so, it is a self-conscious trance, where the Poet-Lover in "obsessive" memory⁸ still circumscribes and measures his own self-forgetfulness. These textures of fusion are well guarded.

Perhaps the Poet-Lover of the Canzoniere even tries to appropriate Laura's death for his own defensive purposes, another act of distancing. His efforts have perhaps caused some readers to believe (probably erroneously) that when Petrarch noted Laura's death in the margin of his Virgil, he was simply tailoring a fiction. After all, when Laura has been removed by death, the Poet-Lover can be even surer of her image. He can summon her presence closer now in the poetry: Laura in morte, more than in vita, will console, advise, linger a while, and even profess her love. Of course, she is never by any means so direct and immediate a presence as Beatrice. But still, the poems continue to grow in the space cleared by her death: just as the Poet-Lover can in vita design her face against a tree or rock, he can mourn both bitterly and sweetly in the landscape that she has abandoned forever:

  et quanto in piú selvaggio
loco mi trovo e 'n piú deserto lido,
tanto piú bella il mio pensier l'adombra.
[129. 46-48]

(and in whatever wildest place and most deserted shore I find myself, so much the more beautiful does my though shadow her forth.)

In the letters, Petrarch writes to "Socrates" of his reaction to the news that two of his friends have been murdered by brigands: "I feel something fatal, horrible, and yet pleasurable to my mind. Assuredly there is a certain sweetness in mourning …" (Fam. VIII. 9, p. 76). He was planning to spend the rest of his life with these friends, he says, living together in a single house; but now that they are removed, he will "feed and torture" himself with mourning. And so the Poet-Lover of the Canzoniere continues for many years to call Laura's name, for the most part unrewarded—and unencumbered—by her answers. Thus in this defensive texturing Poet rises in significance over Lover, as words born in solitude and memory come to seem more important than the longing for the present lady.

Even while Poet and Lover move to distance whole presences, and especially to hold Laura removed in time and space, they move also to bring worded parts of Laura's presence into the body of the poem. It is as though a sensed untrustworthy Source—too near and too far, engulfing and abandoning—provokes these complementary defensive efforts to draw away from the whole and yet possess the parts. The poems seem to incorporate concrete fragments of Source, worded "part objects" of the unwordable "ideal object," with items taken from Laura and her surroundings. The Poet-Lover works to have her in his own terms, so to speak, to control the poem's genesis by devouring and holding absent presence in words that can neither engulf nor abandon the body of the poem. Poet and Lover join in synecdoche, metonymy, symbol or emblem, and phonic texturing to gather these nourishing fragments.

Any simple, whole, direct representations of Laura as donna are soon lost beneath the loving enumerations of her separate beauties, her belle membra, her attributes. Most frequent in this collection are her eyes (begli occhi), her face (bel viso), and her blonde hair (chiome bionde or capei d'oro); but the poems linger also over her arms (braccia,) side (fianco,) feet (piede),limbs (membra), cheeks (guancie), even her hands and fingers, "bella man" and "diti schietti soavi" (199). Cherished parts seem indispensable to these poems: synecdochic presences become habitual substitutes for whole presences, and part-objects are as insistently desired as Source. "Each part of her has the significance of her entire person."⁹ In Petrarchan texturing, the distanced whole and the appropriated parts together seem to allow that solid imagination of fusion upon which the self must spin; they provide the equivalent of Dantean "presencing" to define and direct these lyrics. For this Poet-Lover, however long he continues, never can continue long in vita or in morte without returning to the naming of parts; even the Virgin Mary is praised for her "belli occhi" (366. 22).

The spectrum between synecdoche and metonymy in these poems is a long and full one, so that fragments of Laura accumulate here as in a dream-work to displace the affective charge of her presence among a rich panorama of cathected items, part-presences. She is a glance, a smile, a bearing, sweet whispers, words, angelic singing, an inventory of "mortal bellezza, atti et parole" (mortal beauty, acts, and words, 366. 85). She is a veil, a gown, a white glove; she is l'auro, the gold that binds her hair, as well as l'aura, the breeze that plays with her hair—even the paronomasia is metonymic. For she is here through whatever she touches, through any reality once contiguous: she becomes her footprints upon the grass, as the "sí bel piede" (so beautiful a foot) becomes "be' vestigi sparsi" (lovely footprints, 125. 53, 60); she can be known only through "quest' erba sí" (this grass, 126. 65). Time is ignored by this contiguity—as when in the Trionfo dell'Eternitá the speaker exclaims, Happy is the stone that covers her fair face! This touching need not even be quite physical, for she becomes the quality of the air through which her glance has penetrated:

  Ovunque gli occhi volgo
trovo un dolce sereno
pensando: "Qui percosse il vago lume."
[125. 66-68]

(Wherever I turn my eyes, I find a sweet brightness, thinking: "Here fell the bright light of her eyes.")

This Poet-Lover also manages to turn the moment of the original meeting into an enumeration of time and space, as items near Laura which he can savor one by one: the hour, the instant, the countryside, the place … (61). And of course, metonymy in this texture can move almost imperceptibly toward symbol, when Laura becomes also the parts of the natural landscape that call her to mind. Mountain by mountain, with water, grass, cloud, rock, the naming of parts continues, though displaced from her body: "in tante parti et sí bella la veggio" (in so many places and so beautiful I see her, 129. 38). The Poet-Lover in "Chiare fresche et dolci acque" (126) summons a gently melancholy sequence, part for part: acque (waters) for membra (limbs), gentil ramo (gentle branch) for bel fianco (lovely side), erba et fior (grass and flowers) for gonna (garment) and seno (breast), aere sacro sereno (sacred bright air) for those begli occhi. It seems as though this list can never be completed, can never constitute a whole. And even when the Poet-Lover designs the final vignette of Laura here, to move himself toward his own trance, the poem still holds her only through parts, through lovely branches, falling flowers, blonde braids like burnished gold and pearls. This kind of effort to make her present brings her there only in treasured synecdoche, metonymy, symbol, l'auro: the whole has been scattered into rime sparse.

With this texturing of Laura as part-Presence, metaphor is usually not the language of fusion, the inspired evocation of wordless Source—as metaphor can be in the texts of Daniel or Dante. Instead, metaphor and symbol and emblem here often seem merely to extend the uses of synecdoche and metonymy: unsignifiable presences are regularly assumed to become solid objects rendered by concrete, recurring words, cose in rima. The reader comes to expect metamorphosis by metonymy; the lady under a green laurel becomes virtually a lady-lauro, and the weeping Poet-Lover becomes the stone upon which he sits. In appropriated parts of Ovid, the Poet-Lover becomes a laurel, a swan, a stone, a fountain of tears, a voice, a stag like Acteon (23); emblems of Laura's death, in the corresponding canzone in morte, include a deer, a ship, a laurel, a phoenix, a fountain, and a lady like Eurydice (323). For these poems work to transform presences, and ultimately to transform Source, into emblems, into words. All presences, and infinite Presence, are presumed there by contiguity, all but in the word, in this closely metonymic texture; it is a kind of verbal metamorphosis. And the Daphne myth suits this defensive texture well: in the tree, the fleeing lady is both forever distanced and yet still entirely available. For in these poems words or parts of the laurel can be brought close, appropriated by synecdoche: fronde, rami, legno, scorza, ombra (leaves, branches, wood, bark, shade). Thus the laurel as metonymic symbol yields in turn its own nourishing parts. Like Apollo, this Poet-Lover can take those "sacra fronde" (holy leaves, 34) to himself, or receive the laurel garland from Glory, and thus he guards himself against untrustworthy source. He can distance l'aura while he yet assimilates l'auro, valued part-presences. Perhaps in this way also l'ombra, always on the verge of disappearance or dispersion, can be held in words as a reality almost tangible, sweet and sensual, to feed and generate these poems as selves.

seguirò l'ombra di quel dolce lauro
[30. 16]

(I shall follow the shadow of that sweet laurel)

Poi quando il vero sgombra
quel dolce error …
[129.49-50]

(Then, when the truth dispels that sweet deception …)

L'arbor gentil che forte amai molt'anni
(mentre i bei rami non m'ebber a sdegno)

fiorir faceva il mio debile ingegno
a la sua ombra …
[60]

(The noble tree that I have strongly loved for many years, while its lovely branches did not disdain me, made my weak wit flower in its shade …)

The metonymic use of ombra can belong in these poems to suggestions of sexual union, as when the end-words of the sestina "Non à tanti animali" (237) seem to be repeated and savored as dark, delectable part-objects: piaggia, notte, luna, sera, onde, boschi (rain, night, moon, evening, waves, woods.) For ombra is often gathered into the poems with night and evening, in sensual dream-wish: when the Poet-Lover sees the stars "dopo notturna pioggia" (after nocturnal rain), he remembers her eyes "quali io gli vidi a l'ombra d'un bel velo" (such as I saw them in the shadow of a lovely veil, 127. 57, 62).

Through repeating and savoring, Poet and Lover also join to bring Laura's presence into the poem phonically, so that sounds work as part-presences. In the Secretum "Augustine" accuses "Petrarch" of being in love with Laura's name, and even apart from the multifold paronomasia, the naming of Laura seems itself satisfying, an activity to be relished: "L'aura che 'l verde lauro et l'aureo crine / soavemente sospirando move" (246). Sometimes in his lists of cherished parts the Poet-Lover seems to include this very naming, "qualche dolce mio detto" (some sweet saying of mine, 70. 17), as when he adds to a catalogue of natural beauties "dir d'amore in stili alti et ornati" (poems of love in high and ornate style) and "dolce cantare oneste donne et belle" (sweet singing of virtuous and beautiful ladies, 312), or as when he blesses, along with all the "parts" of their first meeting, "le voci tante" (the many words) that he has scattered in calling her name (61). Her sweet presence seems almost to be ritualistically incorporated, ingested again and again with liquid consonants and open-throated vowels: l'aura, lauro, l'ombra, l'ambra, l'aureo, l'aurora, l'oro, l'auro, laureta. Or the words themselves can become her hair, spread with the l's and s's into delicate, enticing strands:

L'aura soave al sole spiega et vibra
l'auro ch' Amor di sua man fila et tesse;
là da' belli occhi et de le chiome stesse
lega 'l cor lasso e i lievi spirti cribra.
[198]

(The soft breeze spreads and waves in the sun the gold that Love spins and weaves with his own hands; there with her lovely eyes and with those very locks he binds my weary heart and winnows my light spirits.)

In the course of this sonnet he takes her presence into his marrow and blood, while his mind reels with the sweetness, "di tanto dolcezza," that has been swallowed with the words—as the words, perhaps—into the poem. These are words more than pexa, for the very syllables seem delectable: whereas in "Ne li occhi" the words seem to efface themselves before that nameless donna, in Petrarch's poems the words themselves become substantial, upstaging the whole human presence. The words themselves attract and overwhelm: "'l dir m'infiamma e pugne … mi struggo al suon de le parole" (speaking inflames me and pricks me on … I melt in the sound of the words, 73. 10-14). The words seem not to let the light of Presence through, but to rest in themselves.

Thus Poet and Lover join in paronomasia, synecdoche, metonymy, symbol, emblem, and phonic texturing to assimilate nourishing part-presences, worded fragments of Laura's presence, into the Poet-Lover or poem as equivalent self. These part-presences effectively serve as that "image of the lady" which, as Robert Durling points out in his reading of "Giovene donna" (30), seems to become more rigid and more metallic as the Petrarchan lover meditates upon it; these metonymic part-presences, rather than the whole Presence, provide in Petrarchan texture the Aristotelian internalized phantasm of the lady, the impression stamped upon the wax of the lover's soul. The image of the lady hardens into "l'idolo mio scolpito in vivo lauro" (my idol carved in living laurel, 30. 27) because the parts so harden, as Durling points out—the branches diamond, the hair gold, the eyes topaz. Furthermore, we might ask exactly how the Poet-Lover's "psychological fixation"¹⁰ upon these internalized, imagined parts brings about their hardening, for "hard" images are curiously textured in the Canzoniere. Not only is the lady hard, "lei che come un ghiaccio stassi" (she … who now stands like ice, 125. 11), leaving an unanswered flame within him, but he also is hard as though in response:

e d'intorno al mio cor pensier gelati
fatto avean quasi adamantino smalto
[23. 24-25]

(and around my heart frozen thoughts had made almost an adamantine hardness)

He seems to absorb, ingest, take on her hardness: here are Medusa and victim, of course, or in psycho-ontological terms here is a darker version of that original scene of infant spellcasting—unyielding Source becomes frozen self. For Source, however fatally hard, still must be taken in to the vital center of self; we recall the combined responses of mimesis and revenge in Dante's petrose. Thus "hard" or "concrete" images come to suggest not only her Medusa gaze, rejecting and petrifying him (197), but also his response in kind, inevitably mimetic of her or joined to her somehow: he is "hard" because he is ice or marble or stone; but his need for her is also unyielding, as when Time binds him in the "più saldi nodi" (tighter knots, 196) of her hair, or when "il giogo et le catene e i ceppi" (the yoke and the chains and the shackles, 89) entrap him, oppress him. For these chains are also treasures, and belong by metonymy to those cherished parts of Source that the poems so eagerly incorporate, those diamond branches, that "oro forbito e perle" (burnished gold and pearls, 126. 48). By this route the Poet-Lover also becomes "hard" in the strength with which he holds these part-presences, and that hardness becomes displaced upon the parts themselves: her name becomes as solid as marble (104). All these associations of "hard" images, and more, are involved with the Poet-Lover's "fixation" as he contemplates the part-images of the lady. She becomes a part-presence both concrete and vital, "hard" both in her treatment of him and in his intense appropriation of her: "questa viva petra" (this living stone, 50. 78). And he is "pietra morta in pietra viva" (a dead stone on the living rock, 129. 51), in the semblance of a man who thinks and weeps and writes; he takes on her fatal hardness in mimetic response, clinging to her for life even as she deprives him of life. It is as though at his central being, at the primary term of the metaphor here, he is "pietra," like her.

Thus in these complex senses, the Poet-Lover's "contemplation," his motion toward Source, works to harden the partimages of the beloved. Moreover, Poet and Lover move defensively in these words toward yet another kind of "hardening." For one might describe the vocabulary of the Canzoniere, made of small groups of frequently recurring words, as "hard"—refined, restricted, well fixed. The Poet-Lover's metonymic tenacity affects not only the worded fragments of Laura's presence but also the words for his own suffering: pensieri, sospiri, dolor, occhi molli, danni, giogo, vita acerba (thoughts, sighs, grief, soft eyes, pain, yoke, bitter life). He seems to hold to limited sets of words, with little variation: this is hardly a vario stile in vocabulary. In a way the repetitive vocabulary seems almost to encrust these poems with the conventional, the familiar—so that an unusual image would seem intrusive. Bergin notes that the imagery of these poems is "personal," not remaining distinct or "objective" or sharply visual, like Dante's imagery; rather, "with Petrarch the image is absorbed and devoured, and it is precisely this emotional solidarity that the poet seeks."¹¹ Through images made ever more familiar, both Laura and Poet-Lover become constant, possessed in "solidarity." And when in some poems the metonymic vocabulary becomes both substance and audience, as in "Chiare, fresche et dolci acque" (126), the "solidarity" between Poet-Lover and image becomes all the more intense. Poet-Lover becomes a being-in-words defensively, with a vengeance. For in these poems Poet and Lover do not move in infans receptivity, open to the wordless influence of Laura or other whole human presences. In Dante's poems the path to Source, ultimate "fulgore," is clear despite all orribile lingue, so that the language is cosmically diverse, but there is little such "negative capability" in Petrarch's poems. It is as though in Petrarchan texture Source had become treacherous, perhaps both too far and too near, so that individual words are not free to roam and generate worded differences; rather, words seem almost to be circumscribed, taken as part-presences, repeatedly devoured. Through this kind of rigidity, worded part-presences are firmly held, as though in place of a central absent presence, and again Poet comes to seem more important than Lover.

Even the religious language of the Canzoniere does not usually work as the metaphoric language of fusion, but is instead textured with this fixed vocabulary. For usually in the repentance sequences the words themselves remain constant while the references shift from secular to Christian,¹² so that even as the Poet-Lover professes change he is holding stubbornly to the language, the words resisting almost all diversity: the unusual "croce" or "miserere" (62) in such instances becomes the exception that proves the rule. And more generally, the very repetition of certain clusters of religious terms establishes them as part of the "hardened," carefully possessed vocabulary: salute, benedetto, beata, miracolo, meraviglia, paradiso, divina (salvation, holy, blessed, miracle, wonder, paradise, divine). And through further allusions, Christian ceremony and ritual are appropriated, and the "commune dolor" (universal woe) brought to the service of "miei quai" (my misfortunes), in religious terms that are savored as insistently as any others (3). These terms can fill out items of synecdoche, as when her voice is "chiara, soave, angelica, divina" (clear, soft, angelic, divine, 167). They can consecrate metonymic presences:

Qual miracolo è quel, quando tra l'erba
quasi un fior siede.
[160]

(What a miracle it is, when on the grass she sits like a flower!)

Benedetto sia 'l giorno e 'l mese et l'anno
[61]

(Blessed be the day and the month and the year … )

But even when these poems approach the language of fusion, as when the Poet-Lover exclaims, "Costei per fermo nacque in paradiso!" (She was surely born in Paradise! 126. 55), the "blessing" of the Christian words does not seem to enable the words to reach past themselves. The religious terms are, instead, included with the hair, the pearls, the grass, the flowers, the voice—with the treasured metonymic parts, so worded and so named, signifiers as Signified, Poet over Lover.

guerra è 'l mio stato
[164]

(war is my state)

Thus in Petrarchan texturing, whole presences are distanced while part-presences are hoarded in words. Poet and Lover move together in these complementary defenses, and in their difficulties the individuating Poet emerges; the poem, as a being-in-words, rises to distinction. But there is still further defensive texturing in these poems—intricate amant martyr representations through which the distinctive Petrarchan "voice" emerges even more clearly. Here Poet and Lover move in continuing, subtle displacements to deflect negative impulses from the problematic Source of the poems; by contrast, in Dante's works with their secure presencing events, primal rages seem to be diverted simply, as with a single clean stroke, to the walled compartments of the petrose and the Inferno.

Thus in the Canzoniere aggression appears displaced or transmuted into that wearying and interminable sorrow, dolore, pena, that will mark the Petrarchan lover through several generations of love poetry. In his use of Ovid, this Poet-Lover does not include Daphne's sexual fear, and he does not follow the story of Acteon through to his dismemberment:¹³ in these poems, one turns from rage and passion, in painful flight. Of course, he is reluctant to rail at the beloved;¹⁴ what is more, he slights the representations of Laura as "cruel," and instead turns his attentions to his own afflicted image, amant martyr. For in this verbal texture, the presences and personifications that always wound the speaker seem perhaps less important than the pain of the blows:

Voglia mi sprona, Amor mi guida et scorge,
Piacer mi tira, Usanza mi trasporta;
[211]

(Desire spurs me, Love guides and escorts me, Pleasure draws me, Habit carries me away;)

Here and elsewhere, as in the canzone "I' vo pensando" (264), the active, angry verbs become the speaker's continuing pain, passively endured. Potential rage or invective is turned away from Laura as Source, and becomes woven into the vocabulary of his martyrdom: martiri, sospiri, piaghe, mal, duol, pena, dolore, affanno, danno, tristi, duri, miseri, amare, paura, sconsolato, dispietata. That is, war becomes this Poet-Lover's state of being, and he can thereby avoid actively waging war.

Thus as amant martyr, this Poet-Lover turns against himself centrally, from the beginning of the sequence, to emphasize his swift and lasting departure in time from Laura's presence. Unlike Dante's speaker, he does not linger in the universal moment of presencing; he moves immediately de via, away from that briefly invoked "luogo e tempo" (time and place, 2) to reflection upon the moment, and within a very few poems this moment must be called upon from the past. In this way he avoids making Laura's cruelty the target of his invective. For it is Time that here becomes cruel and implacable, that carries the ever-vanishing Source of these poems all the more surely away. And indeed, Time in its merciless turning, volgendo, could eventually scatter that first moment entirely:

Quand' io mi volgo indietro a mirar gli anni
ch' ànno fuggendo i miei penseri sparsi,
et spento 'l foco ove agghiacciando io arsi,
[298]

(When I turn back to gaze at the years that fleeing have scattered all my thoughts, and put out the fire where I freezing burned … )

Time, as the agent of the Poet-Lover's martyrdom, renders him helpless, himself absorbing the possible anger toward the elusive beloved, and thus guarding that problematic Source from aggression. For not only does he typically receive the weight of the transitive verbs: even more frequently, the intransitive verbs governed by the speaker seem to have absorbed the wearing of time: "piango et ragiono" (I weep and speak, 1), "vegghio, penso, ardo, piango" (I am awake, I think, I burn, I weep, 164), "vo mesurando" (I go measuring, 35), "I' vo pensando" (I go thinking, 264. 1), "Là 've cantando andai di te molt'anni / or, come vedi, vo di te piangendo" (Where I went singing of you many years, now, as you see, I go weeping for you, 282).¹⁵ In these present tenses and present gerunds, the entropic force of time acts upon him: these are verbs of habitual endurance, always bearing the implicit threat of full dissolution and absence. With these verbs, time takes the speaker ever further from that first moment, and the painful moments of increasing distance are stretched out as though upon a rack of time. He addresses Laura in one of the earlier poems:

… i' vi discovrirò de' miei martiri
qua' sono stati gli anni, e i giorni, et l'ore;
[12]

(I shall disclose to you what have been the years and the days and the hours of my sufferings;)

For moments are the elements of his martyrdom—in the recurring present tenses, a war of attrition continues to be his present state.

There are some momentary truces in this war, of course. Several defenses appear to cancel each other: even while time threatens to dissolve the memory of Laura's presence, the defensive distancing allows the Poet-Lover to re-create, elaborate, even improve that memory in moments of pace. There is such "breve conforto" (brief solace, 14) in the solitude canzoni, and also when Laura returns in morte. In these cases his endurance seems almost to have earned a renewal, a recovery of presencing, for she appears unmarked by time, "qual io la vidi in su l'età fiorita" ("just as I saw her in her flowering, 336), and the visions bring him "pace" (126. 55), "soccorso" (help, 283), "tregua" (a truce, 285). But these truces are also subject to time, and indeed time will remove these peaceful illusions:

… se l'error durasse, altro non cheggio.
[129. 39]

( … if the deception should last, I ask for no more.)

i' come uom ch' erra et poi più dritto estima
dico a la mente mia: "Tu se' 'ngannata.…"
[336]

(I, like one who errs and then esteems more justly, say to my mind: "You are deceived.…")

Eventually these poems always turn time back against themselves: the cherished memories, like the original moment, yield to the sweep of time. Dante's Commedia moves steadily toward definitive represencing, but Petrarch's Canzoniere is carried away from all represencing scenes. Even though Petrarch in his daily routine fought time like Rabelais' Gargantua, reading while he shaved or ate, and writing in the middle of the night (Fam. XXI. 12, pp. 174-75), he still could acknowledge to Guido Sette, "there is no standing still for man here below; there is nothing but continual flow and down-slipping and at the end the collapse of all" (Fam. XIX. 16, p. 161). "La vita fugge et non s'arresta un'ora" (Life flees and does not stop an hour, 272). There is really no contest in time's war against the self. Time wears away the Poet-Lover, continues to dissolve presencing and represencing scenes: the laurels become oaks and elms (363), and the morte poems reiterate their own fatigue: "Omai son stanco" (Now I am weary, 364). The vaunted moral or religious progress must at best coexist with time's war against all central meaning for this self-in-words. The verbs here appear to have absorbed the rages of primal separation, so that Time in ongoing present tenses keeps drawing the poems toward their own Void, their own unpresenced final appeals.

Moreover, in the amant martyr texturing of these poems, it is not only Time that is turned against the self. The very moment of Presence, such as it is, is turned against the self also, in the elaborated pain of the experience and the memory. In this way also, the Poet-Lover exists in a state of war from the first few sonnets, with the military language of the enamorment as "'I colpo mortal" (the fatal blow) or "primiero assalto" (the first assault, 2) or the time "quando i' fui preso" (when I was taken, 3). Thus far we have only an echo of some of the textures, perhaps, of Dante or Cavalcanti; but Petrarch's Poet-Lover continues insistently to turn the violence of these metaphors upon himself, appropriating the language of colpo, piaghe, giogo, ancide, pena, and taking these words of the pain, as it were, to the heart of the poems. He becomes inseparable from this pain. In this way he manages usually, though certainly not always, to deflect his rage from Laura; it is the moment, the day, the experience that is cruel, "crudo" (298), and not her. But there may be also a causa sui wish defensively textured in this continuing self-affliction. Especially if Source is felt to be untrustworthy—engulfing or abandoning (or both)—the self moves in defense to take charge of, to "write," its own conflicted presencing scene. Thus the self intensifies and receives its own rage toward a Source "too near" or "too far," and perhaps thereby comes to earn a remembered sweetness; the self can design its own nourishing scene of Presence, its own conflated suffering and reward. Indeed, in the Canzoniere that first moment is not really dolce; its sweetness is largely conjured by memory, as though partly in response to the emphatic pain.

Perhaps other defenses are involved here, too. But in any case, surely the complex, defensive representations of the enamorment serve to establish and focus the oxymoronic texture of the Canzoniere.¹⁶ For that first "blow" sets up a radical ambivalence that lasts throughout the sequence, so that no luminous meeting in the light of the lamp, no pure drinking of spiriti with the eyes, is ever quite possible in this texture. Evocations of that first moment are virtually always conflicted, scrupulously including pain; the memory can burden him as well as give him rest. Time renews "le prime piaghe sì dolci profonde" (the first deep sweet wounds, 196); the speaker will bless his wounds (61); anniversaries recall a "per me sempre dolce Giorno et crudo" (Day to me always sweet and cruel, 298), a "dolce amaro / colpo" (sweet bitter blow, 296). And this central ambivalence underlies the rich ambivalences of the sequence, where Poet and Lover move together in the oxymorons, antitheses, and paradoxes—the pain with the joy, the bitter with the sweet—that have come to mark the poetry as "Petrarchan." The love that ensnares him is "l'onesta pregion" (the worthy prison, 296), both a promise and a threat: "Amor, con quanto sforzo oggi mi vince!" (Love, with what power to-day you vanquish me! 85). For in this oxymoronic texturing, the state of war continues. Laura's eyes can emanate a sweet and nourishing light that keeps him alive (71. 76-82), but they can also dazzle or burn him, or wound him (195), or turn his heart to marble (197). Laura makes him feel "dolcezze amare et empie" (sweetness … bitter and cruel, 210), and one can "take in" her presence only through paradox:

Così sol d'una chiara fonte viva
move 'l dolce et l'amaro ond' io mi pasco.
[164]

(Thus from one clear living fountain alone spring the sweet and the bitter on which I feed;)

He would die content of "tal piaga" (such a wound) and live in "tal nodo" (such a bond, 296); she brings life and death at once, and death itself is made sustaining, "bel morir" (beautiful death, 278).

Besides these familiar phrases, there are other textures of ambivalence in these poems, also growing from their centrally ambivalent moment. For even "dolce ne la memoria," the interludes of pace are so slight that they are virtually oxymoronic, disappearing almost at once back into the prevailing guerra. Paradoxically, even these sustaining memories need expression in negative language:

Da indi in qua mi piace
quest'erba sì ch'altrove non ò pace.
[126. 64-65]

(From then on this grass has pleased me so that elsewhere I have no peace.)

pur mentr' io veggio lei, nulla mi noce.
[284]

(As long as I see her, nothing pains me.)

né trovo in questa vita altro soccorso;
[283]

(Nor do I find any other help in this life.)

After all, "dolce giogo" (sweet yoke) is a characteristic oxymoron for his memory itself; his heart is nourished by sighs (1). And of course, the central ambivalence will at times seem to govern the very construction of the sonnets, binding sonnet divisions that would separately express "dolce" or "amaro"; often the Petrarchan volta between octave and sestet seems to be thus formulated. And there are other variations: in one morte sonnet, for example, the first eleven lines savor Vaucluse in its natural beauty, while the last tercet knows the grief of Laura's death (303). More broadly, the ambivalence informs the alternating hope and despair in the morte poems: now he is dazzled by Laura's return as a vision, radiant yet familiar (282; 284); and now he despairs of writing when he realizes that her belle membra are all "poca polvere … che nulla sente" (a bit of dust that feels nothing, 292). And of course, the periodic and final poems of repentance add an overriding ambivalence. Now he blesses that first moment (61), and now he rejects it, a "dispietato giogo" (pitiless yoke) no longer sweet (62). Reinforced by the Secretum, this has been the ambivalence most striking to readers of Petrarch's works. Recently, Aldo Bernardo speaks of the "irreconcilability of Petrarch's haunting polarities," his vacillation between Laura as "myth" and Laura as "living Christian witness."¹⁷ It is as though the Poet-Lover wishes to write a new Source for himself, when he senses that the presencing event he has helped to design is inadequate, after all, and finite.

Thus Poet rises to prominence in these amant martyr representations, in which both Time and the "premiero assalto" are turned against the Poet-Lover. For these poems are defined as rime sparse partly by their war with Time. The speaker is adamant about including the weight, the pain, the dissolution that Time brings. "Cure me, and I shall be stronger, but my bed will be no smoother and softer" (Fam. XV. 4, p. 135). After all, the motions of Poet are served through this defensive texturing, for this Poet-Lover "chi pianse sempre" (who weeps eternally) finds immortality among the blessed precisely through his unending pain, his ongoing passive defeat before Time.¹⁸ By suffering endlessly, he gains endless distinction. Moreover, the oxymoronic texture, established perhaps by that first ambivalent moment, works even further to individuate the Petrarchan "voice." For the tropes of antithesis, oxymoron, and paradox are perhaps those most clearly visible to Petrarch's long line of imitators.¹⁹ We can see the introduction of this texture even in the first sonnet: the Poet-Lover names his own style as the "vario stile in ch'io piango et ragiono / fra le vane speranze e 'l van dolore" (varied style in which I weep and speak between vain hopes and vain sorrow). There are many ways of interpreting the stylistic variety of the Canzoniere, of course. But on the most basic level, "vario" is defined by these very lines, as ranging between hope and despair.²⁰ In this sense the self is "varied," or endlessly vacillating, between the polarities of the oxymorons and antitheses, with no further range or progress possible: "né per mille rivolte ancor son mosso" (nor for a thousand turnings about have I yet moved, 118). And the "van" of the first sonnet surely gestures toward that ultimate defensive ambivalence, rejecting that original moment entirely. For even the interludes of repentance, along with those intermittent protestations of moral progress and those late evocations of Dantean luce,²¹ can be read in the contexts of this vacillation. The path here is almost always "rivolte," not Dante's steady journeying. This self is less centrally secure than the Gherardo who proceeds straight to the top of Mont Ventoux; but for that very reason, the wandering route of "error," more fully informed by Poet, makes this self more distinctive. Thus John Freccero can speak of "real literary strength from fictionalized moral flaws."²² And thus Petrarch can almost proudly apply to himself a sentence from one of Plautus' plays: '"I beat everybody in torturability of soul'" (Fam. IX. 4, p. 83).

There are other strengths for Poet in this antithetical texturing. For through the established habits of oxymorons, antitheses, paradoxes, and contradictions, these beings-in-words become self-generating, in a sense inexhaustible. Through these devices the language comes to feed on its own negations: there must be a pain counterpoint to every pleasure, and each antithetical pair seems to breed further pairs. The sequences of paradoxes (132; 134) gather energy as they continue, as though they could go on forever; they are brought only arbitrarily and temporarily to a graceful close, "In questo stato son, Donna, per vui" (In this state am I, Lady, on account of you, 134). In this texturing the eternity lost at that ambivalent presencing is reclaimed, in a sense, in the very interminability of the tropes. This Poet-Lover, being-in-words, can resonate between speranza and dolore essentially forever; these poems are sustained, born a thousand times a day, by their very lack of rest or repose, their incessant deaths. Thus certainly the last sequence of "conversion" poems, or any other announced closure, would seem inherently unsuitable here. But it is fitting that pace would be the last word for these warring antitheses.

Benedette le voci tante ch'io
chiamando il nome de mia donna ò sparte,
[61]

(Blessed be the many words I have scattered calling the name of my lady.)

As Poet and Lover move through these complex defensive textures, the words themselves rise to importance, and the Poet-Lover is clearly distinguished as a being-in-words. Poet emerges as a strong individuating motion in the negations and deviations of these defensive verbal devices—the savored parts of metonymy and synecdoche; the intensified, melancholy distancing of whole presences; the unending oxymorons, antitheses, and verbs of endurance. This Poet motion, in its unusual pervasiveness and strength, seems in several ways to answer that endemic longing, Lover infans: that is, the poems come in large measure to serve as their own Source, to work as "substitute" Source. These poems seem to offer their own worded beings to themselves in the place of unwordable Source, designing themselves in a negative mimesis to possess the qualities lacked by the elusive, untrustworthy Source intuited at their center.

Some of these qualities we have seen achieved through the defensive texturing itself, which works with Poet to make these poems inexhaustible and self-generating, secure, closely held, unique, full of treasured ideal parts. But the poems also imitate ideal Source through some further texturings where Poet and Lover cooperate: individually, the poems become unified wholes that are sweetly, musically, coenesthetically nourishing. They may also become timeless, permanent "ideal objects" that are places of infinite repose. In these ways the "ben colto lauro" (well-tended laurel, 30.36) replaces Laura; the self feeds its own longing; the poems become themselves that wholly present donna or Source that they do not receive into their texture. In Kohut's terms, perhaps, secondary narcissism absorbs the charge of primary narcissism, and the poems, with a "constant and the conscious egocentricity,"²³ usurp for themselves the place of Source. Thus Freccero is right about the poems' "self-contained dynamism" and "auto-reflexive" thematic,²⁴ in this sense: these are not nove rime, where Source shines through effaced words; rather, these words, in all their opacity and dense music, seem designed to be poetic selves-as-Source.

Petrarch in the letters seems to know that a literary text could work like a maternal presence, arousing and fulfilling expectations at the coenesthetic level of deep sensibility, until the text becomes an integrated and satisfying whole, allowing one to "coenesthetically fantasize" primal identification with Source. For he speaks of his study of Cicero in early childhood:

At that age I could really understand nothing, but a certain sweetness and sonority so captured me that any other book I read or heard read seemed to me to give off a graceless, discordant sound. I must admit that this was not a very juvenile judgment, if one may call judgment what was not based on reason. But certainly it is remarkable that while I didn't understand anything, I already felt exactly what I feel today, when after all I do understand something, little though it be. That love for Cicero increased day by day, and my father, amazed, encouraged my immature propensity through paternal affection. And I, dodging no labor that might aid my purpose, breaking the rind began to savor the taste of the fruit, and couldn't be restrained from my study. I was ready to forego all other pleasures to seek out everywhere the books of Cicero. [Fam. XVI. 1, pp. 292-93]

Whatever this "certain sweetness and sonority" that marks Cicero as a literary presence, it seems to be more profound than mere "understanding," and more lasting—it seems perhaps to reside even at that "level of deep sensibility" posited by Spitz.²⁵ Perhaps Petrarch, having thus been rapt with the sweetness of another's wit, sought himself in the Canzoniere to devise poems that could likewise be capturing presences; perhaps he refers partly to this captivating sweetness when he insists that he wants any reader, while reading, to be "entirely mine" (Fam. XIII. 5, p. 115).²⁶ But whatever the reason, the poems have a lulling, maternal sound. Even while the poems defensively distance whole presences and rigidly possess worded parts, they sound sweetly nourishing. To this end, the coherence and affective energy of each individual Canzoniere poem inheres in an elaborate, tightly woven "interstitial web" in which logical, causal, and syntactic patterns merge and are overlaid with rhythmic and phonic equivalences. Thus Durling notes that "Giovene donna" (30), with its "sense of balance, cyclical recurrence, and progressive intensification and enlargement," outdoes its predecessor, Dante's "Al poco giorno."²⁷ Similarly, Bergin points out that Petrarch, both in syntax and in the stanzaic patterns that seem to flow so easily from syntax, achieved a unity and integrity markedly greater than that of his predecessors who wrote in the medieval pattern of coordinate clauses. For over and above his rhetorical and prosodic virtuosity, Petrarch typically devises a clear statement, straightforward in syntax and diction, "united and musically set forth."²⁸

These poems can be aural presences, with a "certain sweetness and sonority" enhanced by the syntactic unity and balance—presences that address Lover infans on that primal level explained by Spitz, of "rhythm, tempo, duration, pitch, tone, resonance, clang." And on this aural or phonic level most of the poems are quintessentially sweet, a consoling and nourishing music. One might apply to these poems as constructions of sound the same adjectives that cluster around the donna of Dante's nove rime: soave, piano, umile, dolce. Or their sound might remind one of Laura in her morte visitations, as she speaks "col dolce mormorar pietoso et basso" (with … sweet, low, pitying murmur, 286). Granted, in several poems after Laura's death, the Poet-Lover undergoes harsher texturing, roche rime (332, 32), for as he explains,

non posso, et non ò più sì dolce lima,
rime aspre et fosche far soavi et chiare.
[293]

(I cannot—and I no longer have so sweet a file—make harsh, dark rhymes into sweet, bright ones.)

But the uses of the rougher consonant groups seem to be, on the whole, short-lived; in sound, this highly selective vocabulary resembles Dante's pexa words. As in the sweet, incorporative naming of Laura, the resulting aural presence of the poem seems indeed maternal—soave, chiare, dolce.

Chiare fresche et dolci acque …
[126]

Quel rosigniuol che sì soave piagne …
[311]

Soleano i miei penser soavemente …
[295]

Quando io v'odo parlar sì dolcemente …
[143]

We come as readers to rest in "confident expectation" of this lulling voice, the voice of poem as substitute Source, and the music of the individual poem can serve in a way to override or reward the painful negations and deviations of the defensive texturing, somewhat as the sweetness of the memory rewards the Poet-Lover for suffering its "blows."

Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto
favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente
di me medesmo meco mi vergogno;

et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è 'l frutto,
e 'l pentersi, e 'l conoscer chiaramente
che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.
[1]

(But 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; and of my raving, shame is the fruit, and repentance, and the clear knowledge that whatever pleases in the world is a brief dream.)

In this "sweet, low, pitying murmur" of the introductory sonnet, we are told that everything that follows will record only a brief dream, worthy of nothing but shame and repentance. And yet we are enticed to read on even by sound alone—for example, by the dolorous o's and mournful m's of this beautifully weeping voice. For weeping is sweet in the Canzoniere, so that sighs, as this first sonnet also tells us, can themselves be nourishing, and the sighs of these poems are indeed easy to "drink in" with the ear. In the margin of his Virgil, Petrarch writes that he records Laura's death with a certain "bitter sweetness,"²⁹ and when he writes of the death of two good friends, he confesses, "Assuredly there is a certain sweetness in mourning; on this theme I am unhappy enough to feed and torture myself and find pleasure for days at a time" (Fam. VIII. 9, p. 76). This is not a simple masochism, here or in the lyrics of the Canzoniere: Poet and Lover move in defensive textures that convert rage to pain, and then nevertheless, as though in answer to conflicted Lover infans, the pain is made sweet, musical. The poems are rocked with their own intonations, fed with their own sweetness, as they revolve alone in time.

These poems themselves become the significant maternal presences, ultimate systems of equivalences rewarding all "confident expectations," and perhaps therefore the poems are less than successful in assembling Laura as a whole presence. For as we have seen, the evocations of Laura in vita tend to be lists of her treasured parts, and often the poems in morte continue this cataloguing in the ubi sunt tradition (282; 292; 299). For the Poet-Lover is not trying, finally, to evoke Laura as Source, unwordable Presence; the presence of Laura is not ultimately the point here, though it may indeed seem to be. The poem is mimetic of ideal Source while it holds Laura distant. For this is a texture of complex verbal defenses, not Dante's texture of primal receptivity. Dante's pilgrim can hold up the very syllables of Beatrice's name, BE and ICE, as diaphanous to the light of Source (see Par. vii. 13-15), whereas Petrarch's Poet-Lover seeds his own octave and sestet with the syllables of Laura's name, weaving LAU, RE, and TA into his own carefully formed syntactic unit: "Quando … poi … Così … se non che …" (5). The tribute to the lady or her name is lost to, or indeed becomes, the word-play itself, the opaque music of syntax and sound.³⁰ It is his own the presence he is assembling from these fragments of her name, just as throughout the lyrics it is his own presence he assembles from all the synecdochic and metonymic parts of Laura. The poem is the distinctive and recognizable presence; Laura remains a shadow, l'ombra or l'aura, cast by the worded fragments of her.

One wonders whether perhaps this Poet-Lover treats his literary sources in the same way, assimilating them in fragments in order to reconstitute them as himself. He does specify that only a deeply hidden resemblance to the parent literary work should be observable in the child, the successor (Fam. XXIII.19. pp. 198-99); and his oral, incorporative metaphors for this process of making new works from old tend to stress a total assimilation by the new text as self:

… I have read Virgil, Horace, Livy, Cicero, not once but a thousand times, not hastily but in repose, and I have pondered them with all the powers of my mind. I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as a man. These writings I have so thoroughly absorbed and fixed, not only in my memory but in my very marrow, these have become so much a part of myself, that even though I should never read them again they would cling in my spirit.… It has cost me great labor to distinguish my sources. [Fam. XXII. 2, pp. 182-83]

Those who read poetry, "sweet to the taste," should feed on it and absorb it, not just "taste the Pierian honey with their tongue's tip" (Fam. XIII. 7, p. 120).

Sometimes the features of Petrarch's sources seem almost deliberately recognizable, as with the entire quoted lines from predecessors in the love lyric (70), or perhaps more subtly with such Dantean fragments in the morte poems as "l'alma, che tanta luce non sostene" (my soul, who cannot bear so much light, 284), or "la mia debile vista" (my weak sight, 339), or "l'occhio interno" (my internal eye, 345), or even "vera beatrice" (366. 52). But usually this Poet-Lover knows how to devour and digest literary presences thoroughly. Thomas Greene demonstrates that Petrarch aims to produce texts that must be deeply sub-read, and Adelia Noferi discusses Petrarch's style as a blending of the styles of Cicero, Augustine, and Seneca.³¹

There is another sense in which these poems take on the qualities of ideal Source—in the continual application of the lauro emblem to the poems themselves. In this way, the poems as selves reclaim the eternity so doubtful in that elusive central Source. For as lauro, the poems themselves become the desired lady, taking one step further a familiar use of emblems in these poems: "Each of the major emblems for Laura thus at some time or other also stands for the lover, and vice versa."³²

This mimetic effort is not like the straightforward construction of ideal Source in the poems' music; rather, involved here are several defenses—negations and deviations. For as lauro, the poems become the whole presence of the lady forever distanced, and they become thereby an emblem of the Poet-Lover's own unassuageable and ongoing pain. Moreover, by calling themselves lauro the poems imply that they are evergreen, permanent, even petrified—and they are all the more permanent for including the "hardness" of the lady, the rejection and the distancing. Those branches are "sempre verdi" (eternally green, 5) partly because the lady-lauro never yields, indeed is immobilized in her refusal. Eternal desire, as the Gnostics knew, is at least eternal. In this way the poems as lauro become their own treasured part-presences, their own laurel leaves or crown; they "crown [themselves] with the symbol of [their] defeat."³³ This sonnet addressed to Apollo even makes for itself a conclusive laurel crown, in those shading arms:

sì vedrem poi per meraviglia inseme
seder la donna nostra sopra l'erba
et far de la sue braccia a se stessa ombra.
[34]

(Thus we shall then together see a marvel—our lady sitting on the grass and with her arms making a shade for herself.)

Finally, the poems as lauro try to weave into themselves a receptive future audience, moving further to assure their own eternity. These efforts, like other defenses here, are not felt as secure; but at least, in this understanding of lauro both self and Source are intended to live together forever. Petrarch wrote in an early Latin lament on his mother's death, "Vivimus pariter, pariter memorabimur ambo."³⁴ And in the emblem of lauro, the Poet-Lover and Laura are verbally fused: thus in this one opaque word Poet and Lover try to accomplish a fusion that they rarely join to evoke beyond the words. Moreover, the invocation of a sympathetic public helps to confirm these poems as places of infinite repose, to bestow lauro upon these poems as lauro. For an audience can work as Source …, whether it be the masses with their "windy applause" that Petrarch scorned when Dante earned it, or only a circle of initiate readers and lovers, such as those invoked for the Canzoniere. From the first "Voi," those textured listening presences allow a chance of pity and pardon, and they encourage the Poet-Lover's hope: "i' spero / farmi immortal" (I hope to become immortal, 71. 95-96). Laura, God, and the Virgin Mary are possible audiences, too, but they hardly care for the poems as lauro; it is with their future readers that the poems make their largest effort, to texture their own "stade du miroir" and reclaim themselves from the void.

ma ricogliendo le sue sparte fronde
dietro le vo pur così passo passo,
[333]

(but … gathering up her scattered leaves, I still follow after her step by step.)

Thus in the music of single poems, and in the application of the term lauro, these poems are made as beings-in-words that resemble ideal Source—to answer Lover infans, their own central longing. Nevertheless, as a group the poems remain rime sparse, rerum vulgarium fragmenta, as though there is not a strong enough sense of Maternal Source in these texts to integrate them beyond the level of the individual poem. For it is positive maternal affect that organizes the self's ability to organize, and that allows to texts their coherence, affective energy, and intentionality. These poems as a book are fragmenta in response to their uncertain ontological center.

For example, the poems are episodic, and on the whole they are arranged with no felt integration moment to moment; they are joined to each other by only the slightest of narrative threads. No immediately evident design, chronological or otherwise, governs the poems. Bergin has said of the Trionfi and of all Petrarch's longer works that they are composed of fragments, very loosely united, and that this "basic flaw derives from a constitutional incapacity of Petrarch to handle the grand design" for "the synthesizing resolution eluded Petrarch."³⁵ Those who have found patterns in the Canzoniere have had to work hard to do so, as though any real integration in the sequence were well hidden. For instance, Ernest Wilkins has carefully traced the various orderings of the poems, exploring rationales for each of them. Bernardo has recently sought to connect the search for form with the development of Laura's image, especially in the Triumphs; he stresses the frequent reorderings of the last thirty poems. Thomas Roche has suggested that the Christian liturgical calendar may offer a map for the sequence.³⁶ By contrast, Freccero sees the episodic nature of the sequence as a self-contained strength: the poems "spatialize time" and are "free of the threat of closure."³⁷ But even with such an implied rhetorical infinity, Poet still threatens Lover, for the poems are also "free," in their fragmentation, of those secure organizing affects that could enable integration and closure. As a whole, the sequence hardly forms a densely integrated presence, even though the rich defensive texturing is insistently distinctive, always identifiable as Petrarch. Durling speaks of Petrarch's "intensely self-critical awareness that all integration of selves and texts is relative, temporary, threatened."³⁸ But the best description of the fragmentary nature of the sequence is Petrarch's own, or his adoption of Dante's metaphor: the leaves of this book are scattered, rime sparse, because they have not been well bound with Love. The Poet-Lover must keep toiling, step by step, in the endless task of collecting again all the scattered leaves of lauro, self and Source.

Moreover, some of the defensive texturing seems finally to fail, to threaten the intentionality of the sequence, to cut rather too deeply into the Canzoniere as self. For instance, time as antagonist seems not only to distinguish this Poet-Lover but also gradually to remove the purpose of his existence. As the sequence endures through twenty-one years "ardendo" (burning) and another ten years "piangendo" (weeping, 364), he tells us ever more often that he is weary, "stanco di viver" (weary of life, 363), and we sense a relaxing of his will to continue in those potentially inexhaustible antitheses, Poet without Lover. At several points the weight of time, and the grief at Laura's death, seem to usurp for him even his "sense of an ending," to bring this weeping and writing figure to an abrupt close.³⁹ Also with the experience of Laura's death, the Poet-Lover seems to lose his defensive confidence that he can possess worded parts of Laura's presence. He seems to move beyond his earlier inexpressibility tropes and now fully to acknowledge, at moments, the distance between his worded part-presences and a Presence beyond words. Whatever I spoke or wrote about her, he once says, "fu breve stilla d'infiniti abissi" (was a little drop from infinite depths; 339).⁴⁰ As she tells him in her last visionary appearance, she is now a "Spirito ignudo" (naked spirit), inaccessible to mortal words and far above the level of his sweet music, "queste dolci tue fallaci ciance" (these sweet deceptive chatterings of yours, 359. 60, 41).

Even more troubling for the coherence of the sequence are those intermittent repentance poems and the final "conversion" poems, where Poet and Lover turn against the self centrally, at the presencing moment. Here defensive ambivalence surely jeopardizes the very reason for the existence of poems and Poet-Lover, their entire foundation of affective energy. The poems contend that they should be otherwise created, that they should be "più belle imprese" (more beautiful undertakings, 62). In this thorough self-doubt, Laura becomes an invalid Source, a mistake, and poems that grow from her absent presence are likewise invalid:

… i' chiamo il fine per lo gran desire
di riveder cui non veder fu 'l meglio.
[319]

( … I call out for the end in my great desire to see her again whom it would have been better not to have seen at all.)

All the poems of Laura have been a wandering, an error, better never to have been. When in De Librorum Copia Joy boasts, "I possess countless books," Reason replies, "And countless errors.…"⁴¹ In the last poems even lauro disappears:

terra è quella ond' io ebbi et freddi et caldi,
spenti son i miei lauri, or querce et olmi.
[363]

(She is dust from whom I took chills and heat; my laurels are faded, are oaks and elms.)

With lauro no longer evergreen, Laura ceases to be named: "tale è terra" (366. 92). The Virgin Mary is brought forward as legitimate Source, new ground of the poems' being:

Vergine, i' sacro et purgo
al tuo nome et pensieri e 'ngegno et stile,
la lingua e 'l cor, le lagrime e i sospiri.
[366. 126-28]

(Virgin, I consecrate and cleanse in your name my thought and wit and style, my tongue and heart, my tears and my sighs.)

But this consecration works only for future poems, not for past ones, and now the sequence is over. The whole sequence seems to have been merely a prelude to its palinode: these retractions, if one takes them at all seriously (and many readers have been understandably reluctant to do so), draw all purpose and intentionality from the poems and leave them grounded on full absence. In this sense we have perhaps not literary strength, but literary weakness, from fictionalized moral flaws. As the first sonnet announces, the poems to follow are to be understood as valueless: raving, "vaneggiar," and cause for repentance, and "giovenile errore." They have taken their being from one who is dust. Who would ask integration or coherence, then, from such fully devalued poems as these?

Perhaps this ultimate turning-against-the-self works as a last, desperate defense—a "splitting" away of almost all the poems as "bad" in order to preserve the ensuing silence after the sequence as "good." That is, the poems seem to annihilate themselves, to renounce their long-held purposes, in order to purify the blank spaces beyond themselves, to conjure the Void as God or true Source. To put it another way, one must renounce all, must be "revolted by physical pleasures and nauseated by unremitting joys," in order to reach "the still, secure harbor of life" (Fam. XXI. 13, pp. 175-76). And among these possible joys the Poet-Lover surely includes the formation of the self in words, "queste dolci tue fallaci ciance." For in these defensive textures some would recognize the "Augustinian" Petrarch holding sway over the "Ciceronian." Bergin finds in the Africa a "melancholy acknowledgment that nothing in this world is of lasting importance," and in the De remediis a "continuous disparagement of life's joys" that seems "to come very close to a negation of the value of life itself and to press the pessimistic attack somewhat beyond the Christian frontiers."⁴² If poems and self are fully renounced, then it is all the more likely that God may lie behind the poems, "il ver tacito … / ch'ogni stil vince" (that silent truth which surpasses every style, 309), cradling their lamentations.

But if there is this "splitting" defense at work, it too is ultimately a failure. These poems cannot quite bear to throw themselves away. Thus they reclaim themselves from the silence, gathering their scattered leaves and presenting them to the reader: "Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono / di quei sospiri" (You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs). For these poems, despite all doubts, fall back upon themselves as Source. In this texturing, Eternity is not other than, but merely più bella than Laura,⁴³ and correspondingly the Poet-Lover's Eternity is not other than the painful, defensive response to her in these words. To belong in Eternity, this Poet-Lover must be one "chi pianse sempre."

Notes

1. Epigraph "And that my suffering may not reach an end, a thousand times a day I die and a thousand am born, so distant am I from health."

   Quotations from the Canzoniere or Rime sparse are from Petrarch's Lyric Poems, translated and edited by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press. In general, I give line numbers only for the canzoni. Translations are Durling's unless otherwise noted.

2. Letters from Petrarch, selected and translated by Morris Bishop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 19 (Fam. I. 1). All passages from Petrarch's letters, the Epistolae familiares (Fam.) and the Epistolae seniles (Sen.), are cited in Bishop's translation.
3. See Thomas G. Bergin, Petrarch (Boston: Twayne, 1970), pp. 38-39.
4. John Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," Diacritics, 5 (Spring 1975), 35.
5. Bergin, p. 36.
6. Fam. xiii. 5, pp. 112-15; Bergin, pp. 33, 79.
7. Oscar Budel, "Illusion Disabused: A Novel Mode in Petrarch's Canzoniere," in Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium, ed. Aldo Scaglione, NCSRLL, 3 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 150.
8. Bergin, p. 170.
9. Freccero, p. 39.
10. Robert M. Durling, "Petrarch's 'Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro,'" Modern Language Notes, 86 (1971), pp. 9-11, 16.
11. Bergin, p. 178.
12. See my article "Petrarch's Courtly and Christian Vocabularies: Language in Canzoniere 61-63," Romance Notes, 15. 3 (1974).
13. See Robert M. Durling, Introduction to Petrarch's Lyric Poems, p. 28.
14. See Leonard Foster, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 14.
15. Thomas Greene points out that the characteristic verb tense of the Canzoniere is the iterative present: The Light in Troy: Imitation and Deconstruction in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, to be published in 1982). In my comments about Petrarch's poems, I am indebted to Greene's perceptive readings.
16. Greene has remarked that rhetorical escape from the oxymoronic pattern of these poems can be only momentary.
17. Aldo S. Bernardo, Petrarch, Laura, and the Triumphs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), pp. 201, 63.
18. Trionfo dell'Eternità. line 95.
19. Foster, p. 74.
20. William J. Kennedy, in Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), discusses the rhetorical strategy of the Petrarchan speaker in his first chapter, "The Petrarchan Mode in Lyric Poetry." He says, "By 'vario stile' one may understand the range of tones, moods, and attitudes, that play off one another in balanced patterns of statement and reversal, thesis and antithesis, resolution and dissolution.… One could thus characterize the modality of the Petrarchan sonnet by how it involves the reader in the speaker's evolution of thought, feeling, idea, and attitude through multiple statements, shifts, and reversals within a formally limited space of fourteen lines" (pp. 26-28).
21. See for example poems 61-62, 80-82, 141-42, 277-96, as well as those later poems involving Laura's visitations and the Poet-Lover's "conversion."
22. Freccero, p. 37.
23. Bergin, p. 191.
24. Freccero, pp. 37, 38.
25. See René A. Spitz, The First Year of Life (New York: International Universities Press, 1965), pp. 98, 135-36.
26. See above, Chap. 1, at n. 59.
27. Durling, "Petrarch's 'Giovene donna,'" p. 5.
28. Bergin, pp. 175-76.
29. Translated by Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
30. If there is an impulse to reparation here, it is very much the new presence that is being put together. See above, Chap 1. n. 60.
31. Thomas M. Greene, "Petrarch and the Humanist Hermeneutic," in Italian Literature: Roots and Branches (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 211-21. Adelia Noferi, L'esperienza poetica del Petrarca (Florence: Le Monnier, 1962), pp. 118-49.
32. Durling, Introduction, p. 32.
33. Budel, p. 144.
34. "We two live together; we will be remembered together." This is Ep. Met. I. 7, and is quoted in Bergin, p. 39. Bergin specifies that the number of lines in the poem is equal to the number of years in Petrarch's mother's life.
35. Bergin, pp. 152, 103.
36. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., "The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch's Canzoniere" Studies in Philology, 62 (1974), 152-72.
37. Freccero, p. 39.
38. Durling, Introduction, p. 26.
39. According to Ernest H. Wilkins in The Making of the "Canzoniere" (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951), Chap. 9, poems 292 and 304 were each at one time designed as final poems for the Canzoniere. See Table 1, p. 194.
40. See my article "The Evolution of the Poet in Petrarch's Canzoniere," Philological Quarterly, 57 (Winter 1978).
41. De Librorum Copia, in Petrarch: Four Dialogues for Scholars, ed. and trans. Conrad H. Rawski (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1967), p. 35.
42. Bergin, pp. 114, 131.
43. See 359. 64; 268. 40-44, Trionfo dell'Eternità, 143-45. The final poem of the Canzoniere argues that love for the Virgin Mary should be proportionately greater than love for Laura (366. 121-23).