[In the essay below, Durling provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of the Rime sparse.]

Ser Petracco (or, as he sometimes spelled it, Petrarcha) of Florence was exiled from his native city in 1301, at the same time as his friend Dante Alighieri; but his later life was much more prosperous than Dante's. Along with many other Italians he eventually moved to Avignon, the new seat of the papacy, where he became one of the most successful members of the legal profession, thanks partly to the patronage of powerful Italian clergymen. His eldest son, Francesco, who had been born in Arezzo on July 20, 1304, was eight when the family moved to Provence; with his mother and brother Francesco lived near Avignon, in Carpentras. Francesco was given every educational advantage. As a boy he had adistinguished tutor, the grammarian Convenevole da Prato, and as a young man he was maintained for ten years as a law student at two of the foremost universities of the day, first Montpellier and then Bologna.

After Ser Petracco's death in 1326, Francesco and his brother, Gherardo, returned to Avignon, now the most cosmopolitan cultural center in Europe, and lived for a time as wealthy young men about town. Whether the two squandered their considerable inheritance or whether they were swindled by their father's executors and their own servants, as Francesco later related, or both, it eventually became necessary for them to seek some means of support. The idea of practicing law seems to have been repugnant to Francesco from the outset; he decided to take the path of clerical preferment, which would allow him the leisure to continue his studies, and at some time he probably took minor orders so that he could legally hold benefices.

Already a great classical scholar in his early twenties, Francesco came to the attention of a powerful Roman family, the Colonnas, and in 1330 he formally entered the service of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna as a private chaplain (this may have meant no more than that he occasionally sang prayer services in the chapel), remaining more or less loosely under the family's patronage until 1347-48. From 1330 on Petrarch lived essentially in a scholarly semiretirement guaranteed for him by his connections with the great, carrying on a voluminous correspondence with learned and princely friends all over Europe, and frequently indulging his love of travel. Thanks to the patronage of the Colonnas and other prominent friends, he was able to accumulate benefices (most of them in Italy) that assured him a modest financial independence. Although throughout his life he willingly served on special diplomatic missions for popes and other rulers, he repeatedly refused preferments—for instance as a bishop or as papal secretary—that would have meant the end of his devotion to study.

Between 1326 and 1337 Petrarch lived mainly in Avignon; in 1337 he moved to the wild, romantic source of the Sorgue River at the fountain of Vaucluse, twenty miles east of Avignon. The 1340s brought momentous events in Petrarch's life. On Easter Sunday, 1341, Petrarch's celebrated coronation as poet laureate took place on the Capitol in Rome; skillfully dramatized by Petrarch, this event added considerable luster to his fame, especially in Italy, and led to his spending increasing amounts of time there. Petrarch's coronation oration, in form a sermon on a text from Virgil's Georgics, calls for a rebirth of classical wisdom and poetry and develops in some detail the idea of the laurel as symbolic of poetry and literary immortality.

In 1342 Gherardo became a Carthusian monk after the death of his beloved, and except for brief visits to Montreux in 1347 and 1353, Petrarch never saw him again. Petrarch's daughter, Francesca, was born in 1342 (his son, Giovanni, had been born in 1337); she lived with him until the end of his life. It is not known who the mother of these illegitimate children was. In 1345 Petrarch made his most notable philological discovery, that of the manuscript of Cicero's letters to Atticus, Quintus, and Brutus, in the library of the cathedral of Verona; these were the models for his collections of his own letters. In 1347 Cola di Rienzo's attempt to revive the Roman Republic at first evoked Petrarch's sympathy. His feelings changed, however, as it became increasingly antipatrician and several members of the Colonna family were killed in bloody uprisings. In 1347 the Black Death appeared in Sicily and began to make its way up the peninsula; during 1348 and 1349 Petrarch lost to it a number of friends and relations, including Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, the poet Sennuccio del Bene, so frequently addressed in the Rime sparse, and, he tells us, his beloved Laura.

In October 1350 Petrarch visited Florence for the first time (while on a pilgrimage to Rome) and there made acquantance with his devoted admirer, Giovanni Boccaccio, beginning a friendship that lasted until Petrarch's death. To what extent Petrarch's much-debated religious conversion took place in the late 1330s, in the late 1340s, or in the early 1350s will probably never be determined fully. There is no doubt, however, that after 1350 he rewrote much of his earlier work and composed poems and letters with fictitiously early dates.

In 1353 Petrarch left Provence for good, accepting first the patronage of the Visconti in Milan, who were emerging as the most powerful dynasty in Italy. Boccaccio and other Florentine republicans were scandalized by this apparent condoning of what they regarded as tyranny. Petrarch maintained that he had complete independence, but it seems clear that the Visconti were able to take advantage of his prestige as an ambassador by manipulating his vanity. In 1361 Petrarch left Milan, perhaps because of the increasing gravity of the plague there (his son died of it that year), and gravitated toward the Venetian sphere of influence, while continuing to maintain friendly relations with the Visconti. After long periods of residence in Venice, Pavia, and Padua, he retired in 1370 to a modest house (still standing, though much altered) that he built on land given him by Francesco da Carrara, lord of Padua, at Arquà in the Euganean Hills, where he lived until his death on the night of July 18, 1374.

Boccaccio once accused Petrarch of having spent his life with princes, and the charge has considerable weight in spite of Petrarch's reply that it was the princes who had sought him and that he had preserved his independence. His friends were princes, prelates, and their servants. His identification with privilege was unquestioning, and his quietism amounted to tacit consent in the political arrangements of the day. It can be claimed for him that he did not seek political power for himself (although he does seem to have cherished the hope that Clement VI would make him a cardinal, which may help explain his strange mixture of adulation and denunciation of that pontiff), that when he was manipulated it was because he was naive, and that he actively sought to promote Christian virtue (including the ideal of crusade against the Moslems) and to prevent war among the Christians. But he set a style of ambiguous relation of humanist to prince that in the later Renaissance was to degenerate into subservience.

The glory of the Italian communes was a thing of the past, and it was inevitable that in a society increasingly dominated by princely courts Petrarch's effort to create a secular role for the man of letters should be aristocratic in orientation. After 1350 both Petrarch and Boccaccio threw the weight of their influence on the side of aristocratic culture in Latin; their audience was learned and international, not peninsular, let alone municipal. But both are beloved for the other side of their genius and for their writings in Italian.

To immortalize Laura is an avowed purpose of the Rime sparse, as of the Trionfi and many verse epistles and eclogues in Latin. We do not know who she was, however, or even whether she really existed. One of Petrarch's closest friends, Giacomo Colonna, seems to have doubted that she was anything but a symbol and a pretext for poetry. At the other extreme are the sixteenth-century commentators who, like Vellutello, imagined a biographical basis for each poem, or the abbé de Sade, who in the eighteenth century discovered what he thought was archival evidence for Laura's being an ancestress of his who died in 1348. Outside of the poetry, however, evidence is slight. Petrarch answered Giacomo Colonna's charges in a letter, asserting that Laura was only too real, his passion all too unfeigned. But the letter by itself is very inconclusive evidence, since it was clearly written for publication (at least in the limited sense of circulation among the poet's friends and wealthy patrons) and since it serves just as much to call Laura's reality into question as to prove it.

More interesting are the references to Laura in Petrarch's Secretum, probably first written around 1342 and revised after Laura's death. Although the Secretum is as dominated by Petrarch's reflexive irony as any of the works intended for publication, he never published it, and there is no evidence that he ever intended to. This dialogue between Francesco and his spiritual mentor, Saint Augustine of Hippo, imagined as taking place in the presence of Truth, consists of the saint's efforts—sometimes resisted, often successful—to bring his charge to the realization of his sinfulness and of the inadequacy of his earlier efforts to change. The first two books analyze Francesco's preference for a state of sinfulness and measure his varying subjection to each of the seven capital vices. In the third book, Augustine singles out what he regards as the two greatest obstacles to Francesco's repentance—his "virtuous" love for Laura and his immoderate desire for glory. Francesco argues heatedly against the saint's critique, but he is outmaneuvered by Augustine to the point of acknowledging that his love for Laura must have a basis in sensuality, since he would not have fallen in love with an equally virtuous woman in an ugly body. At one point, in a passage that was probably added in revision, the saint points out that one must expect a woman "worn out with frequent childbearing" to have limited life expectancy. The precision of this indication, in a work presumably not intended for publication (and in none of Petrarch's Italian or Latin poetry or other published works is there any reference to Laura's being married or having children), may be regarded as strong evidence of her existence.

Another piece of evidence is furnished by a note on the flyleaf of Petrarch's copy of Virgil. Throughout his life, Petrarch used the flyleaves of various books for personal notes (lists of his favorite books, gardening enterprises, and so forth). On the flyleaf of his Virgil—a magnificent codex apparently commissioned by Petrarch and his father, stolen at some time but recovered in 1347, when Petrarch commissioned a frontispiece by his friend the famous painter Simone Martini—Petrarch wrote obituaries of relatives and friends. One of the notes refers to Laura.

Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate. The sad tidings reached me in Parma, in the same year, on the morning of the 19th day of May, in a letter from my Ludovicus. Her chaste and lovely form was laid to rest at vesper time, on the same day on which she died, in the burial place of the Brothers Minor. I am persuaded that her soul returned to the heaven from which it came, as Seneca says of Africanus. I have thought to write this, in bitter memory, yet with a certain bitter sweetness, here in this place that is often before my eyes, so that I may be admonished, by the sight of these words and by the consideration of the swift flight of time, that there is nothing in this life in which I should find pleasure; and that it is time, now that the strongest tie is broken, to flee from Babylon; and this, by the prevenient grace of God, should be easy for me, if I meditate deeply and manfully on the futile cares, the empty hopes, and the unforeseen events of my past years. (Translated by E. H. Wilkins, in his Life of Petrarch [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961], p. 77)

This note suggests some of the respects in which the Rime sparse are an expression of genuinely held attitudes—the sense of the connection between grief and contemptus mundi, of the liability of earthly existence, of the passage of time—all amply substantiated in Petrarch's repeated experience of bereavement. It suggests also some insights into the indirection, not to say evasiveness, of the Rime sparse.

For the Rime sparse avoid the factual. There is no mention of Laura's being a married woman (if such she was) or having children, just as there is no mention of Petrarch's two illegitimate children or their mother. There is no mention of Saint Clare's Church—in fact, there is no mention of any encounter with Laura taking place indoors (the inference is possible in several cases, but not imposed by the text). The Rime sparse transpose all "events" to the level of recollection and reflection, bring them into a zone where the dividing line between fact, illusion, and fiction is obscured. This is partly a literary elegance, partly a serious theme—again, the line is hard to draw. Not one external event involving Laura is related in a literal, straightforward, factual manner. Did he actually see her bathing naked in the Sorgue? Did he first see her in Avignon and then later fall in love with her in Vaucluse? That is possible, but for the purposes of the Rime sparse it is assumed that the first encounter and the decisive encounter are the same. Furthermore, April 6, 1327, was not Good Friday; it was the historical anniversary of the Crucifixion, as its date was calculated in Petrarch's day. But poem 3 says he fell in love amid "the common grief," which clearly implies the liturgical date. (The solution would seem to be that he did not expect the reader to remember the difference.) As Aldo S. Bernardo and Bortolo Martinelli have recently pointed out, April 6, 1348, the date of Laura's death, was Easter Sunday. The coincidence of the two anniversaries comes to involve both the penitential implication for the lover and the assurance of Laura's salvation.

The figure of Laura emerges in the Rime sparse with a concrete vividness, rich with at least implied incident, quite different from the hieratically stylized or philosophically abstract manner of the dolce stil or the Vita nuova, justifying De Sanctis formula that in comparison with Dante, Petrarch brought woman down from Heaven to earth. Still, Laura herself is not the central focus of the poetry. Her psychology remains transcendent, mysterious (perhaps even miraculous, but that is evaded), the subject of conjecture and bewilderment except at moments represented as virtually total spiritual communion. Rather it is the psychology of the lover that is the central theme of the book.

Although Petrarch was accustomed in later life to disparage poetry in the vernacular, he lavished intense if intermittent care on his own over more than forty years. It does not consitute a large proportion of his entire literary output—some 10,000 lines of Italian verse (the Rime sparse, the Trionfi, the uncollected poems, a few fragments), as opposed to thousands of pages of verse and prose in Latin—but it has been accepted as his greatest achievement. He apparently began writing the poems that were to form the Rime sparse in the early 1330s; perhaps by 1335 he had decided to make a collection; by the mid-1350s most of the 366 poems had been drafted. Working papers of various kinds, from first drafts to fair copies, have come down to us for sixty-five poems and for several of the Trionfi in the Vatican Library's codex Vat. Lat. 3196. Many of these papers have dated marginal notations, and on their basis the great Petrarchan scholar Ernest Hatch Wilkins built a series of hypotheses about the development of the collection. The first version of the collection that actually survives is a preliminary, incomplete one that Petrarch allowed to circulate in 1359. It is found in a manuscript (the Vatican's Chigi L. V. 176) that includes an anthology of poems by Dante and others, and an important version of Boccaccio's life of Dante; it is now generally thought to have been transcribed by Boccaccio himself. This version of the Rime sparse consists of 215 poems (1-120, "Donna mi vene," 122-156, 159-165, 169-173, 184-185, 178, 176-177, 189, 264-304; in that order).

In 1366 Petrarch began intensive work on a definitive version of the Rime sparse. He replaced "Donna mi vene" with 121, drastically revised the order of poems after 156, and added 151 other poems, many of which he revised just before they were transcribed into his definitive copy. Abandoned by his copyist late in 1366, Petrarch continued to revise, transcribe, and rearrange the poems well into the last year of his life. The definitive manuscript of the Rime sparse, Petrarch's own copy, is the Vatican's codex Vat. Lat. 3195; poems 121, 179, 191-263, and 319-366 are in Petrarch's handwriting. Wilkins inferred reliable dates of transcription into Vat. Lat. 3195 from notations in Vat. Lat. 3196, from variations in the handwriting and ink of Vat. Lat. 3195, and from fairly detailed knowledge of Petrarch's whereabouts from 1366 on. Some time after the transcription had been completed in 1374, Petrarch renumbered the last thirty poems, thereby sharpening the focus of the conclusion. The final version of the Rime sparse is the basis of this edition.

Both the Chigi version and the post-1366 versions (Petrarch allowed several copies to be made from Vat. Lat. 3195 while it was in progress) have two parts, often referred to, somewhat inappropriately, as poems in vita and in morte. The second begins with the great canzone of inner debate, "I' vo pensando" (264). In Vat. Lat. 3195 the division between the two parts is indicated by an elaborate initial for poem 264 and by the presence of seven blank pages before it; whether Petrarch meant to add more poems there has been debated.

In the Chigi version and in manuscripts deriving from it, in Vat. Lat. 3196, and in Vat. Lat. 3195 it is possible to trace the process of revision of individual poems, in some cases from the first draft through several versions to the final one. Some of these materials have been assembled by Carl Appel and Angelo Romanò in their editions of Vat. Lat. 3196, but there has been no reliable codification of all the variant readings, and a truly critical edition of the Rime sparse is still awaited.

Petrarch's themes are traditional, his treatment of them profoundly original. From Propertius, Ovid, the troubadors, the Roman de la rose, the Sicilians, the dolce stil novo, Dante, Cino da Pistoia there comes to him a repertory of situations, technical vocabulary, images, structures. Love at first sight, obsessive yearning and lovesickness, frustration, love as parallel to feudal service; the lady as ideally beautiful, ideally virtuous, miraculous, beloved in Heaven, and destined to early death; love as virtue, love as idolatry, love as sensuality; the god of love with his arrows, fires, whips, chains; war within the self-hope, fear, joy, sorrow. Conceits, wit, urbane cleverness; disputations and scholastic precision; allegory, personification; wooing, exhortation, outcry; praise, blame; self-examination, self-accusation, self-defense; repentance and the farewell to love. These elements of the world of the Rime sparse all exist in the tradition. Petrarch's originality lies in the intensity with which he develops and explores them, in the rich, profoundly personal synthesis of divergent poetic traditions, in the idea of the collection itself.

Although Petrarch's wide familiarity with troubador poetry is evident on every page of the Rime sparse, the way in which he assimilated and made use of its influence—at all levels—was shaped by the example of Dante. The study of Provençal poetry, in particular the poems of Arnaut Daniel, had had a profound effect on Dante, provoking (around 1296) a series of radical experiments, the rime petrose (stony rhymes), so called because the central theme is the hard, unyielding cruelty of the lady. The way Petrarch learned to adapt to his own purposes what he found in the rime petrose was a key moment in the clarification of his attitude toward both the Vita nuova and the Commedia.…

One of Petrarch's greatest originalities lies in the idea of the collection itself. C. S. Lewis once wrote that Petrarch invented the sonnet sequence by omitting the prose narrative found in the Vita nuova, and it ought to be kept in mind that, as Wilkins established, before the Rime sparse it was the custom to keep different metrical forms separated, in different sections of manuscripts. (The Verona manuscript of Catullus separates short poems in lyric meters from long poems in lyric and other meters and from poems in elegiacs; Italian manuscripts regularly separate sonnets, ballate, canzoni; the same principle applies in Provençal collections.) The Rime sparse are arranged as if they are in chronological order, and most modern opinion holds that they are in fact more or less, and with certain notable exceptions, in the order of composition. But this cannot be determined with much reliability, since the anniversary poems, which used to be thought of as anchors of the "real" chronology, could have been written years later or even years earlier, and we have evidence in Vat. Lat. 3196 that a number of the poems of the first part were written long after 1348. The work presents a fictional chronology that should not be confused with a real one, and the ordering of the poems derives from artistic principles.

As a collection the Rime sparse have a number of models. Some are classical: Horace's Odes, Virgil's Eclogues, Propertius' and Ovid's elegies are collected in works that form composites, made up of separate units arranged in complex, obliquely symmetrical patterns. In the Vita nuova, the retrospective prose narrative explains the circumstances of composition of the poems and provides some technical commentary; the assumption is that the poems express the most intimate experience of the poet, the meaning of which becomes apparent only later, not at the time of writing. This becomes an important principle in the Rime sparse: the meaning of experience is qualified in retrospect, and the passage of time becomes a structural principle as well as a major theme. It is discernible both in the recurrence of the anniversaries and in the succession of separate poems. Presented as if the products of distinct occasions, the poems are arranged as if deposited by the passage of time. Omitting the prose narrative means that there is no mediation between poems, that the reader must supply the narrative and psychological inferences. Successive poems often may or may not have been written on the same day (in the fictional chronology). The passage of time may cast altogether new light on earlier poems, as the second anniversary poem (62) does on the first one (30), or as Laura's death does on the whole first part.

The Vita nuova provided another structural principle for the Rime sparse. It has thirty-one poems in the following order: ten sonnets or short poems, one canzone, four sonnets, one canzone (prophetic of Beatrice's death), four sonnets or short poems, one canzone, ten sonnets or short poems. Petrarch derived from this arrangement the idea of placing canzoni and groups of canzoni as structural nodes or pillars at varying intervals among the short poems. The arrangement of the second part of the Rime sparse is a particularly clear allusion to the symmetry of the Vita nuova: it has three groups of canzoni, separated by long stretches of sonnets, standing at the beginning (264, 268, 270), the middle (323, 325, 331, 332), and at the end (359, 360, 366); the first group of sonnets is exactly twice as long as the second, but the mid-point of the second part falls in poem 331. Laura's death is announced in poem 267, which gives exactly one hundred poems from there to the end.

Wilkins accepted Ruth S. Phelps' view that the poems added in the post-Chigi versions were less carefully arranged than those in the Chigi version. It is increasingly clear that this view was based on utterly inadequate criteria and is untenable. Rather what emerges from recent studies is that Petrarch's notion of what he was seeking to achieve in the arrangement of the poems grew clearer as he neared the end of his work on them. His renumbering of the last thirty poems is a striking instance.

Petrarch was less an inventor of new forms than an untiring explorer of the possibilities of existing forms. More than anyone before him, he demonstrated the remarkable range of the sonnet; he developed a new flexibility, sinuousness, and variety in the canzone; he made the sestina peculiarly his own. Some discussion of forms here is vital to an understanding of the interrelation for him of form and the other aspects of poetry.

The formal principle of the sonnet is closely related to that of the Italian canzone stanza. The Italian sonnet consists of two parts (octave and sestet) theoretically governed by a different "melody"; its divisions are marked by the rhymes, which do not overlap between the two parts. The rhythmical, formal contrast between the parts is between double-duple movement (2 x 4 lines, four appearances each of two rhymes) and double-triple ( 2 x 3 lines, two appearances each of three rhymes, or vice versa). Petrarch explores the possibilities of symmetry and contrast among the parts of the sonnet with endless ingenuity, and the self-conscious technical mastery is integral to his expressiveness. It is commonly said that the Petrarchan sonnet presents a situation, event, image, or generalization in the octave and in the sestet a reflection, result, or application. Many do follow such a scheme, but the range of possibilities is broad, and it is characteristic of Petrarch to capitalize, in the sestet, on the division between first and second tercet—to introduce a qualification or reversal, often epigrammatically coming to focus in the very last line. I shall discuss one example in order to suggest some of the subtlety of what may seem to modern readers merely formal or cerebral.

An extreme case of Petrarch's artificiality, the fifth poem in the Rime sparse, puns on the meaning of each syllable of Laura's name (Laurette, adapted to high style in a Latinate form, Laureta). In the octave, after a pair of introductory lines, each of the three syllables receives two lines of comment:

Quando io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi
e 'l nome che nel cor mi scrisse Amore,
LAU-dando s'incomincia udir di fore
il suon de' primi dolci accenti suoi;

vostro stato RE-al che 'ncontro poi
raddoppia a l'alta impresa il mio valore;
ma "TA-ci!" grida il fin, "ché farle onore
è d'altri omeri soma che da' tuoi."
(5.1-8)

When I move my sighs to call you and the name that Love wrote on my heart, the sound of its first sweet accents is heard without in LAU-ds.

Your RE-gal state, which I meet next, redoubles my strength for the high enterprise; but "TA-lk no more!" cries the ending, "for to do her honor is a burden for other shoulders than yours."

The regularity of the pattern (two lines per syllable) is connected with the idea of slow pronunciation of the name. What is said about each syllable, in addition to being a pun (though that is not strictly true in the case of the first, since according to traditional etymology laurus was derived from laudare, to praise), also plays on the position of the syllable in the name: praise, he says, begins with the first syllable; next, the energy is redoubled; and the ending calls for silence. Even more: the position of the syllables in the lines corresponds to their position in the name—beginning, middle, and—but just when the structure is becoming mechanical, the urgency of anxiety brings the third syllable back to the beginning of the line.

In the sestet the positioning of the syllables is different. The first two appear immediately and together, while the third is delayed until the last line of the poem (thus the promise of the octave is obliquely fulfilled):

Cosi LAU-dare et RE-verire insegna
la voce stessa, pur ch' altri vi chiami,
o d'ogni reverenza et d'onor degna;

se non che forse Apollo si disdegna
ch'a parlar de' suoi sempre verdi rami
lingua mor-TA-1 presuntuosa vegna.
(5.9-14)

Thus the word itself teaches LAU-d and RE-verence, whenever anyone calls you, O Lady worthy of all reverence and honor; except that perhaps Apollo is incensed that any mor-TA-1 tongue should come presumptuous to speak of his eternally green boughs.

The first tercet sets up a neat chiastic relation between line 9 and line 11; it leads up to degna as establishing the explanation of the strange efficacy of the name. Degna is thus the hinge of the sestet; juxtaposed with it is the forbidding and enigmatic disdegna, and the last lines bring in a more serious anxiety than the finitude of the poet's gifts—the finitude of his existence itself. The silence of line 7 is now connected with the idea of death.

Is this merely precious, trivial play? What is the relation between the urbane, witty, complimentary surface and the recurrence of the anxiety, a recurrence dictated by the last syllable of the name, inherent in the formal "perfection" itself? The last word of the poem, vegna, may seem a curiously weak one in view of the emphasis on the last syllable of the name. But that emphasis in fact gives it a relief, and it is to be connected with line 12 of the next poem: "a morte mi trasporta; / sol per venir al lauro"—to speak the name is itself to reenact the myth of Apollo and Daphne. That Petrarch found this an interesting poem may be inferred from his giving it such a prominent place at the beginning of the Rime sparse: it is the first poem that refers to the myth of Apollo and Daphne.

Brief mention will suffice for the other short forms Petrarch uses. The term madrigal has no precise formal meaning. All of Petrarch's (52, 54, 106, 121) are experiments in three-line groups (their schemes are, respectively, A B A, B C B, C C; A B A, C B C, D E D E; A B C, A B C, D D; A B B, A C C, C D D). The principle of ballata form is that after an initial statement of a ritornello (a melodic unit that recurred, originally, thus a rhyme scheme, not a refrain) one or more stanzas follow, each of which ends with the ritornello; the first rhyme(s) of these later ritornellos must be attached to the rhymes of the individual stanzas, and the last rhyme repeats the last rhyme of the original ritornello, thus (11): A B B A (ritornello), C D E D C E, E F F A (stanza). When there is more than one stanza, each starts afresh. Most of Petrarch's ballate have only one stanza; two (55 and 59) have two stanzas.

The longest poems in the Rime sparse are canzoni, a form in which Petrarch's greatness as a poet reaches its fullest expression. In both the Provençal and the Italian type, a canzone consists of several stanzas of identical form, the form being devised by the poet: he is free to make the stanza as short or as long as he pleases (Petrarch's shortest stanza is seven lines long; his longest, twenty), to arrange the rhymes as he pleases, and to mix long and short lines as he pleases. (Petrarch's long lines are always the normal Italian eleven-syllable line, corresponding to iambic pentameter; his short lines all have seven syllables.) The canzone usually ends with a commiato or congedo (farewell) that repeats the scheme of the last few lines of the stanza.

It is integral to Petrarch's cult of technical refinement that (except for the sestinas) he devises a new stanza for each new canzone. There are two exceptions to this rule, each involving successive poems. One is the sequence of three canzoni in praise of Laura's eyes (71-73), all in the same stanza form. The other is the pair 125 and 126, discussed below. As one might expect, the interplay in the Rime sparse of the different stanza forms and different lengths of poems is carefully planned.

Most of Petrarch's canzoni are of the Italian type, in which the stanza has two "melodies," two rhyme schemes that are separate, except that the first line of the second part rhymes with the last line of the first part. As Dante had pointed out, either or both the parts of the Italian canzone stanza could be symmetrically subdivisible (into two or three parts) or not. Petrarch's stanzas are always divisible in the first part, indivisible in the second. Here is a stanza in which there is a clear division of sense between the first and second parts:

   In quella parte dove Amor mi sprona   A
conven ch' io volga le dogliose rime      B
che son seguaci de la mente afflitta       C
quai fien ultime, lasso, et qua' fien prime?      B
Collui che del mio mal meco mi ragiona   A
mi lascia in dubbio, sì confuso ditta.      C

  Ma pur quanto la storia trovo scritta    C
in mezzo 'l cor che sì spesso rincorro      D
parlando an triegua et al dolor soccorro.    D
Dico che perch' io miri                    e
mille cose diverse attento et fisco,         F
sol una donna veggio e 'l suo bel viso.    F
(127.1-14)

Like the overwhelming majority of Petrarch's stanzas, this one has a first part of six lines; most rhyme like this one, some rhyme A B C A B C. Second, most of the stanzas end, like this one, with a rima baciata (two consecutively rhymed lines). Third, in almost all his stanzas, as here, the second part begins with some variant of C D E E D, and the longer ones even repeat it (the second part of poem 23 is C D E e D F G H H G F F I I). In other words, in Petrarch's usage, the two parts of the stanza tend to be "melodically" related in a way similar to the two parts of the sonnet: in the first part of the canzone stanza the double-triple rhythm, similar to the sestet of the sonnet, governs; in the second part, within the basic asymmetrical indivisibility, there is usually a recurrent sense of double rhythm in the groups of four lines and in the paired lines.

Petrarch used the Provençal type of stanza, which has no division, much less frequently, and in such poems as 70 and 206 there is still a strong feeling for division. The stanza of 135 is a hybrid:

Qual più diversa et nova                a
cosa fu mai in qualche strania clima,     B
quella, se ben s'estima,                   b
più mi rasembra: a tal son giunto, Amore.  C
Là onde il dì ven fore                    c
vola un augel che sol, senza consorte,     D
di volontaria morte                        d
rinasce et tutto a viver si rinova.            A
Così sol si ritrova           a
lo mio voler, et così in su la cima         B
ed' suoi alti pensieri al sol si volve,       E
et così si risolve,                            e
et così torna al suo stato di prima;         B
arde et more et riprende i nervi suoi       F
et vive poi     con la fenice a prova.   (f) A
(135.1-15)

This stanza has a symmetrically divided first part and seems to move into the ordinary division with line 9; instead it reintroduces both the a and B rhymes. Thus a and B occur at the very beginning of the stanza; A, a, and B at the center; and B and A at the end. The connection with the theme is clear: the form is renewing itself, finding itself again (lines 8 and 9), ending with its beginning (line 15), in a cycle like that of the phoenix.

The sestina, which was probably invented by Arnaut Daniel, is technically a canzone with undivided stanza, of a type that Arnaut particularly cultivated—one in which rhymes do not occur within stanzas but only between them (canso a coblas dissolutas—poems 29 and 70 are of this type) and in which the same rhymes are used throughout the poem (coblas unissonans—29 is an example). More than half of Arnaut's poems are of this difficult type. The sestina has two further refinements: instead of rhymes, entire rhyme-words are repeated, and the order of the rhyme-words is changed according to a fixed rule, called retrogradatio cruciformis (cruciform retrograde motion): a B C D E F, f A E B D C, and so forth. This procedure would in a seventh stanza bring back the original order; instead Arnaut closes the poem with a three-line envoi in which each line ends with two of the rhyme-words. Arnaut's sestina, "Lo ferm voler q'el cor m'entra," is a brilliant poem in which the technical daring is the tense victory of an expressiveness combining obsession, warmth of intimacy, angry frustration, and ironic self-awareness.

Dante's sestina, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," is an important part of the petrose group.… Both Dante's and Arnaut's sestinas are almost by definition unique—one would be surprised to see either poet repeat the form, devised and conquered in an individualized act of expression. Dante—who had changed Arnaut's form by making all six lines the same length—went on to invent an even more elaborate and difficult form, sometimes called a double sestina, though it is not properly a sestina at all ("Amor, tu vedi ben" …). The rime petrose are consciously microcosmic; "Io son venuto" is based on (1) a parallelism between the cycles governing the cosmos and the cycles governing the life of the self; (2) the traditional parallelism between the realms of nature and the parts of the human body. The sestina is a particularly clear example of a cyclical form expressing the embeddedness of human experience in time.

Petrarch assimilated, codified, and diluted the intensities of Dante's sestina and the other rime petrose in order to fit them into his own poetic universe. That he wrote nine sestinas (or ten, if you count 332 as two) is indicative of the process. His theme is not the victorious ascent out of time, though the number six has in the Rime sparse an importance analogous to that of the number three in the Commedia, As medieval readers knew, God created the world in six days, and on the sixth day (Friday) He created man. According to many medieval authorities, including Dante, man fell on Friday also; and Christ redeemed man on a Friday. Six was, then, the number of the created world, of man's earthly existence, of man's excess, and of time. Seven, corresponding to the day God rested, and eight, corresponding to Easter, were the numbers of eternity, of life beyond the world and beyond time. In Petrarch's sestinas the recurrence of the six rhyme-words expresses the soul's obsession with its inability to transcend time. The rhyme-words recur cyclically but with changing meanings, and the form reflects the nature of the mutable world, governed by cycles in which all things change but recur: omnia mutantur, nil interit (Metamorphoses 15.165). The commiati of Petrarch's sestinas, furthermore, usually have a function related to the figural significance of the number seven: they allude to the intensity of contemplation (30), to conversion (42, 214), to death (22, 332), to the end of time (22). It is not accidental that the vast majority of Petrarch's canzone stanzas have a first part of six lines. Petrarch made the number six peculiarly his own, as can be seen also in the number of poems in the entire Rime sparse, 366 (6 x 60 + 6), probably a solar number (the number of days in a leap year), and in the importance assumed by that anniversay of anniversaries, feria sexta aprilis: the sixth day of the fourth month. Recent studies suggest that numerological principles also govern the arrangement of the Rime sparse to a hitherto unsuspected degree.

The theme of the first sight of Laura derives much of its importance from the fact that Petrarch accepts the traditional conception of love as an obsession with the mental image of the lady, imposed on the fantasy at the moment of falling in love. For the image to take effect, the force with which its arrow reaches the heart must derive from both a special sensuous intensity and a predisposition to love in the observer. Under the right conditions, just as in perception the mind—the imagination—assumes the form of a lady as mental image, so the will assumes her form as its goal; when the two coincide, the image of the lady is always before the mind's eye, the will always moves toward her. So mind and will cooperate to inflame each other. Here is Andreas Capellanus' description of the typical process of amorous meditation:

only from the reflection of the mind upon what it sees does this passion come. For when a man sees some woman fit for love and shaped according to his taste, he begins at once to lust after her in his heart; then the more he thinks about her the more he burns with love until he comes to a fuller meditation. Presently he begins to think about the fashioning of the woman and to differentiate her limbs, to think about what she does, and to pry into the secrets of her body, and he desires to put each part of it to the fullest use. Then after he has come to this complete meditation, love cannot hold the reins, but he proceeds at once to action … This inborn passion comes, therefore, from seeing and meditating. Not every kind of meditation can be the cause of love, an excessive one is required (immoderata cogitatio); for a restrained thought does not, as a rule, return to the mind, and so love cannot arise from it. (The Art of Courtly Love, trans. J. J. Parry [New York: Columbia University Press, 1941], pp. 28-29)

Andreas is describing the process of a natural love that proceeds to a natural goal, but Petrarch's subject is the possibility of a sublimated, virtuous love, and the different forms of his fantasies are expressions of the conflict inherent in sublimation. Insofar as his love is a form of sexual desire, it consists in sexual fantasies, but these are seldom of the explicit kind Andreas describes. The most nearly explicit ones emerge almost against the lover's will, either when he is off his guard or when his obsession has reached a particularly intense phase (as in 22 or 237). A major theme is the way the lover's meditation on the lady's virtue and on her virtuous influence paradoxically leads to the emergence of the sensual basis of his love. A clear instance is poem 37, closely related to Dante's canzone montanina, "Amor, da che convien pur ch' io mi doglia." … The subject of both poems is the destructiveness of the obsession with the lady's image as the lover deliberately evokes it. Dante states the theme directly (lines 16-28); Petrarch's poem enacts the principle dramatically: it is the very composition of the poem, a self-pitying meditation on his absence from Laura, that instead of consoling him causes the image to emerge to consciousness and makes his suffering worse. Just before the midpoint of the poem, he states his realization that, since it is in his power not to prolong the process, the composition of the poem is a perversity (lines 49ff). As he describes the psychological mechanism of this self-indulgence he simultaneously enacts it, and thus the activity of introspective poetic composition results in the emergence to dominance—both in his consciousness and in the poem—of an image of Laura that becomes gradually more sensuous. The poem ends with the cycle completed, with the failure of hope all the more exacerbated.

The fullest exploration of the self-destructiveness of this process is in poems 71-73, where the desire to praise the beauty of Laura's eyes and their power to guide him to virtue is shown dramatically to lead into an uncontrollable negative spiral. He is led to say what he does not wish to say—that he is unhappy—and the poem culminates in a thinly veiled sexual fantasy:

così vedess' io fiso
come Amor dolcemente gli governa
sol un giorno da presso
senza volger giamai rota superna,
né pensasse d'altrui né di me stesso,
e 'l batter gli occhi miei non fosse spesso!
(73.70-75)

Might I see thus fixedly how Love sweetly governs them, only one day, up close, without any supernal wheel ever turning, nor think of any other nor of myself, and the blinking of my eyes not be frequent!

There are two kinds of expression in the Rime sparse of the fantasy of sexual fulfillment. The direct form avoids sensuous particularity (for example, poem 22); the indirect form, as here, is veiled, but the link with poems 22 and 237 is provided by the optative past subjunctive. Even more important is the presence behind all these passages of the fantasy of fulfillment in Dante's "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," lines 53-78.… Dante's fantasy asserts the passage of time as constitutive of a prolonged sexual encounter, but Petrarch calls for time to stand still. Petrarch's model is the Beatific Vision of God; the more sensuous the content, the greater the tendency to assimilate the fantasy toward the safe religious category of contemplation. The stasis Petrarch desires is both an intensification of the fantasy and an evasion of the idea of activity. This critical tension between contemplative form and sexual content is a major theme of the Rime sparse, and not least in the second part.

Petrarch's exploration of the experience of love thus derives considerable depth from his use of Augustinian psychology and metaphysics. The most important Augustinian concepts underlying his analysis are (1) the power and deceptiveness of the images of desire; (2) the instability of man's nature, fluctuating among inconsistent desires and multiple loves, spiraling downward toward nonbeing unless upheld, integrated (collected, to use the Augustinian term favored by Petrarch) by grace; (3) the opposition of eternity and time (eternity represents fullness of being, unchanging stability; time represents succession, change, instability).

Petrarch represents the experience of love in terms of these oppositions, but he does not resolve them unambiguously, as Augustine does. In the Augustinian view, sexual desire is love directed outward and downward toward mutable lesser goods; it is doomed to frustration and subjects the soul to its own habitus ad nihilum, its tendency toward nothingness. In this view sexuality is not a source of integration but of disorder, and the Augustinian answer to it is denial. The Rime sparse do demonstrate the lover's subjection to the fluctuating instability of his will, as in the juxtaposition of contradictory poems represented as written on the same day, often an anniversary (poems 60-63, for example). Caught in the inconsistency of his desires, wandering in the labyrinth of his illusions, the lover is only intermittently capable of identifying the erotic source of even his most sacrosanct fantasies. Laura's death does not solve the problem; rather it frees his fantasy all the more, and he imagines her coming down from Heaven to sit on his bed in all her beauty (359), a kind of fantasy earlier identified as dangerous nonsense (345). The lover must pray for grace to heal the split in his will and clear the clouds from his understanding. But the unambiguous experience of grace never comes, and the Rime sparse end not with victory achieved or assured but with the longest and most poignant of the many prayers for help.

Although Petrarch's pessimism accepts the Augustinian critique of love of the mutable, the other pole of his ambivalence asserts its value. Two of the longest canzoni (264 and 360), placed at the beginning and near the end of the second part, dramatize the impossibility of simple judgments about love; they are closely related to the debates of book 3 of the Secretum. For the experience of love makes possible the only integration the lover does in fact achieve, however temporary or imperfect it may be. Absence is an experience of scattering, presence one of synthesis; the image of Laura in the memory is a principle of integration. This can be seen with particular clarity in the central group of canzoni in the first part, 125-129, most of them explorations of different aspects of the dominance in his fantasy of the image of Laura.

Poems 125 and 126, which form a unit, show clearly the identity in Petrarch's mind of the problematics of poetry and love, both seen in terms of Augustinian categories. In 125 the intensity of the poet's frustration has created a split between the inner poignancy of his feelings and his capacity to express them. If he could express them adequately he would surely win her love, he says, but his frustration has so accumulated with time that he has become blocked even from the kind of outpouring of feeling that formerly gave him relief though it did not succeed in winning her love (stanzas 1-3). There may seem to be a characteristic Petrarchan paradox in these beautiful verses discussing the poet's inability to write beautiful verses. The paradox has a point, for it focuses the problem of the relation of outer and inner, of form and content: it is resolved by the poem's being dramatic, of representing the simultaneity of love and poetic inspiration as in process.

The initial situation in 125 is one of impasse, split, alienation, resulting from the fact that Laura, the source of integration and inspiration, is absent. The block can only be broken by an upsurge of energy that will free the sources of feeling and resynthesize the existential situation, reunite inner and outer. A way must be found to make Laura present, and it will consist in eliciting the full power of her image. At the moment there seems no way to accomplish this.

In the fourth stanza the focus of attention is the setting of the meditation (we are meant to identify it as Vaucluse), and the gesture of addressing the landscape is represented as a defeated renunciation of direct address of Laura. Actually this is a first step toward evocation of her presence, but it begins as a demonstration of her absence. The lover's eye interrogates the scene, running discursively over it for the signs of her former presence. The poem ends on a note of provisional satisfaction afforded by imagining her "scattered footprints," which evoke the memory of disconnected moments—not synthesized—of the experience of the first day. In this, poem 125 is recapitulating and gathering up a series of scattered recollections that began around poem 85, and includes especially 90, 100, 108, 112, 116 (all sonnets).

In poem 126 the lover's meditation continues the despairing indulgence in alienation: he imagines his death and hopes to be buried here; after his death, Laura will return to seek him, but he will be dust, and she will weep for him. Here the mixture of despair and displaced wish fulfillment—a low point in terms of any real future but for that very reason safe for fantasy, disinterested and therefore laden with affect—triggers the release called out for in 125, and the image of the first day abruptly emerges with a greater intensity than in any other poem of the book.

This release has a magical intensity partly because its stanza form is identical with that of 125 except that the last line of each stanza has eleven syllables instead of seven, a difference that is stunningly effective in suggesting the overcoming of the halting inhibition of 125. The difference between the two poems is signalized also at the beginning of 126 by the prominence given the image of water (never directly mentioned in 125) and of Laura's body. Poem 126 begins where 125 leaves off, with a discursive interrogation of the place: it looks back to the unsynthesized past, then to the blocked, defeated present, then to the transcendent—and useless—future (in which Laura will interrogate the place); finally comes the ecstatic image, and the synthesis reintegrates both the lover's sense of Laura and the poet's evocative power.

The image itself (stanzas 4 and 5) derives its categories from the Beatific Vision. It is a suspended moment, its immobility evoked by the motion of the falling flowers, Laura's nimbus or glory. It is a contemplative rapture that is utterly engrossing, from which the lover can no more turn away than the blessed can from God. The rain of flowers is a direct reference to the appearance of Beatrice in Purgatorio 30:

Tutti dicean, 'Benedictus qui venis!'
  e, fior gittando di sopra e d'intorno,
'Manibus o date lilia plenis!

.…
Così dentro una nuvola di fiori,
  che dalle mani angeliche saliva
  e ricadeva in giù dentro e di fuori,
Sovra candido vel cinta d'uliva,
  donna m'apparve, sotto verde manto
  vestita di color di fiamma viva.
(Purgatorio 30.19-21, 28-33)

All were saying, "Blessed is he who comes" and, throwing flowers above and around, "O give lilies with full hands!" … So within a cloud of flowers that rose up from the angles' hands and fell back again within and without, girt with an olive branch over her white veil a lady appeared to me, under a green mantle clothed in the color of living flame.

Petrarch's flowers are natural flowers, expressive of the culminating but transitory moment of the springtime, as opposed to angelic flowers; Laura is sitting, not standing like Beatrice; the flowers touch Laura, falling first on her lap, while Beatrice is within the cloud and there is no mention of the flowers' touching her. Dante will eventually cross the river and see Beatrice unveil herself: for him the moment is a circumscribed, provisional goal soon to be transcended; for Petrarch it is almost mythic original synthesis that is a goal in itself. The release, in 126, is both sublimated and orgasmic, and consciously so. The sowing of seed is displaced from the lover to the tree; the lover may not acknowledge the wish, and the tree contains and isolates Laura, protects both lover and poet, and permits the symbolic release, the moment of grace.

A major emphasis of the last stanza of the poem is the difference between the image of Laura treasured in the lover's mind and the "true image," from which the lover says he was "divided." By definition the memory has been transfigured by desire. It is an image from the distant past—eighteen years back, according to the fictional chronology (see 120). To what extent is it an accurate memory even of his own experience, to what extent refashioned? The question hovers over the vision: the incessant falling of the flowers is the sign both of the present urgency and of the passage of time—the barrier that separates the present from the unrecoverable past. Thus in the Rime sparse memory is reevocation and resynthesis, it must be constantly renewed. The recurrences of space and time—revisiting of the consecrated place, commemoration of the recurrent anniversary (a kind of secularization of the Christian year), a new interest in the milestones of experience, personal anniversaries, memorials—express also the anxiety of a reflexiveness clearly aware of the willed, even arbitrary, element in each of its self-assertions.

Poems 125 and 126, then, provide a model of the Petrarchan-Augustinian dialectic of dispersal and reintegration that governs the entire Rime sparse. As the fullest evocation of the original synthesis, the climax of 126—emerging from the alienation of 125 (and the sonnets)—provides essential support to the three other canzoni in this central group. The appearance of 125-129 as a group (in violation of chronological order and geographical logic) is an enactment of relative psychological integration around the image of Laura; it is also an important formal node, a poetic integration, of the book. That "Italia mia," Petrarch's most important patriotic poem, is part of this group is not accidental: surrounded by the great love canzoni, with which it has many structural and poetic similarities, it is meant to be related to the critical psychological insights of these poems. The dialectic of 129, where the ascent of the mountain is accompanied by increasing awareness of the lover's actual situation, culminates in a measurement of distance which brings release because of the sense of exalted clarity. Poem 127, a rich exploration of the theme "all things remind me of Laura," gradually intensifies the nature images to the superb effect of stanza 5, where the static image of roses in a vase indoors is suddenly given life in the image of the wind moving across a meadow. But that intense—if indirect—evocation of the imago is not the culmination of the poem, for in the sixth stanza the summation suddenly brings to the fore the theoretical models on which the poem has been based.

  Ad una ad una annoverar le stelle
e 'n picciol vetro chiuder tutte l'acque
forse credea, quando in sì poca carta
novo penser di ricontar mi nacque
in quante parti il fior de l'altre belle
stando in se stessa à la sua luce sparta,
  a ciò che mai da lei non mi diparta;
né farò io, et se pur talor fuggo,
in cielo e 'n terra m'à racchiuso i passi,
(127. 85-93)

Perhaps I thought I could count the stars one by one and enclose the sea in a little glass when the strange idea came to me to tell in so few pages in how many places the flower of all beauties, remaining in herself, has scattered her light in order thatI may never depart from her; nor shall I, and if at times I flee, in Heaven and earth she has circumscribed my steps.

The idea of a supreme source of beauty which though transcendent fills all things with its omnipresence, which cannot be escaped by any flight, mirrors the relation of God to the universe and to the human soul, as described in the Wisdom of Solomon 7:26-27 and Psalm 138:2-13, passages repeatedly echoed by Augustine in the Confessions (see especially 1.2-4, 7.16- 19, 10.33-38), not to speak of Dante in the opening lines of the Paradiso.

The remarkably original and innovative structure of the Rime sparse, with its mixture of symmetries and looseness, with its structural pillars—groups of canzoni where what is scattered among the short poems is gathered and brought to fuller development—this form reflects the provisional, even threatened nature of the integration of experience possible for natural man. Perfect integration of a life or a book comes only when the mutable and imperfect is caught up into eternity. That ultimate gathering, that binding of the scattered leaves, comes only on the anagogical Sabbath. The force of Dante's claim to have the Commedia stand as a perfectly integrated poem rests, as Dante understood, in its claim to derive from God, the ultimate unifier of all things:

Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
legato con amore in un volume,
ciò che per l'universo si squaderna.
(Paradiso 33.85-87)

In its depths I saw internalize itself, bound with love in one volume, what through the universe is scattered unbound.

This is the point of Petrarch's title for his collection, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of vernacular poetry), for which the Italian is given in the first poem: "rime sparse" (scattered rhymes). This may well be the first use of the term fragment to describe a kind of work of art. There is, however, a scriptural precedent in the story of the miracle of the loaves and fishes (John 6:12), where Jesus says "Colligite fragmenta quae supersunt ne pereant" (Collect the fragments that remain lest they perish). Bede and Alcuin interpreted the words as referring to the gathering together in exegesis of the prophecies and allegories scattered through the Bible. For Petrarch the term expresses the intensely self-critical awareness that all integration of selves and texts is relative, temporary, threatened. They flow into multiplicity at the touch of time, their inconsistencies juxtaposed as the successive traces of a subject who dissolves and leaves only words behind.

Metamorphosis is, then, a dominant idea in the Rime sparse. It is seen in the psychological instability of the lover, the ontological insufficiency of human nature, in time, in death. It is an idea that governs the relation of the poems to their sources or to the broader tradition: they transform it. It governs the relation of the individual poems, themes, motifs, forms, even individual words, to each other. Ovid is omnipresent. The first and basic metamorphosis in the Rime sparse reenacts the myth of Apollo and Daphne: when the lover catches up with the object of his pursuit, she has turned into the laurel tree. It is merely the change of a letter that turns Laura into lauro (laurel), and since Petrarch did not have the apostrophe as part of his punctuation, but simply ran elided words together, there was for him hardly an orthographic distinction between Laura and l'aura (breeze) or lauro and l'auro (gold). The deployment of these various kinds of metamorphosis is so ingenious that many critics have been blinded to the poetic seriousness that lies behind them.

Transformation into the laurel is a figure of sublimation, in which desire accepts an object other than its natural one; instead of Laura, the lover gets (or becomes, it amounts to the same thing) the laurel of poetic achievement and glory. The longest poem in the Rime Sparse is the canzone "Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade" (23), which a marginal note in Vat. Lat. 3196 calls "one of my earliest" ("est de primis inventionibus meis"). In a highly artificial, elaborately rhetorical style, the poem narrates the "events" of the lover's experience as reenactments of six Ovidian myths of metamorphosis. He falls in love with Laura and turns into a laurel tree like Daphne; because his overreaching hope, like Phaeton, was struck down by a thunderbolt, he turns into a swan and mourns like Cygnus; because, misled by deceptive appearances, he spoke of his love after having been forbidden, he turns to stone, like Battus; because all his pleading for mercy is to no avail, he turns to a fountain of tears, like Byblis; though mercifully restored to his own shape, he begs for mercy once more and therefore is divided into stone and a wandering voice, like Echo; finally, one day while out hunting, when the sun is hottest, he stands gazing at Laura naked in a fountain, whereupon she sprinkles his face with water, like Diana, and he is transformed into a fleeing deer, like Actaeon.

The theme of the poem is the incomprehensible changeability of the self in love, which is so violent as to call its very identity into question. The myths succeed one another in a brilliant, surrealistic superimposition of images. There is a baffling coexistence of abrupt, radical instability and of permanence and cyclicality. It is obvious that the myths were not chosen at random, and Petrarch expects the reader to know Ovid and to be alert to subtle changes. None of the myths is reenacted in its entirety or without some significant change. Petrarch's lover completes three times a cycle that takes him through falling in love, hoping and wooing, being rejected and rebuked, and finally (Cygnus, Byblis, Echo) lamenting and writing poetry. Poem 23 ends with the Actaeon myth for many reasons: it is the most violent episode in "Nel dolce tempo"; it is the least metaphorical, the least disguised; it allows the fullest emergence of sexual affect and acknowledges most fully the fear resulting from a sense of taboo. Furthermore, it is significant that Petrarch ends the series of transformations with one that is in process: he is still in flight.

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.
(23.157-160)

for I felt myself drawn from my own image and into a solitary wandering stage from wood to wood quickly I am transformed and still I flee the belling of my hounds.

"Ch' i' senti' trarmi de la propria imago" echoes the words describing the first transformation into the laurel (lines 41-45); the unusual turn of phrase of the second two lines quoted here is richly ambiguous, the shift in tenses startling.

What Petrarch has omitted from Ovid's myths is also part of the meaning of the poem. He has left out Daphne's sexual fear and her flight from Apollo. In Ovid's account of Actaeon, as the dogs begin to tear Actaeon to pieces he tries to call them by name, to reveal his identity; but, since he is now a stag, that is impossible, and all he can do is weep. In Ovid the myths (with the exception of that of Battus, which Petrarch skillfully adapts) are about frustrated love, about loss and refusal. 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.

As Petrarch saw, the myth of Actaeon is 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. These extremes are also connected in the myth of Orpheus, who was able to move rocks and trees and tame beasts; he both recalled Eurydice from death and was dismembered after losing her again (Virgil, Georgics 4.522: "discerptum latos iuvenem sparsere per agros"—tearing the youth apart, they scattered him across the wide fields). By beginning and ending "Nel dolce tempo" with Daphne and Actaeon, Petrarch paired myths that are related to the deepest preoccupations of the Rime sparse: dismemberment or scattering versus integration; poetic immortality versus death; the creation of poetry as an expression of the impossibility of speech resulting from sexual fear.

Thus the myths of Daphne and Actaeon are intimately connected with Petrarch's other great mythic symbol, the Medusa (Ovid's account is in Metamorphoses 4.617ff), whose sight turns men to stone—indeed, into marble statues, something like works of art. Traditionally, the Medusa had been variously interpreted: as a symbol of the fear that blinds the mind (Fulgentius), of lust (Ovide moralisé), of the power of memory (Fulgentius). Dante's rime petrose are based on the idea of a young woman whose heart is hard as stone; she is a "stone that speaks and has sensation as if it were a woman." This lady is associated with the influence of the cold planet, Saturn, and with the freezing of all nature in the depths of winter. If her cruelty continues long enough, she will turn the lover into a marble statue; in other words, she will be a Medusa for him, an implicit though never stated reference. A celebrated incident in the Inferno has Dante, outside the gates of Dis, threatened with the sight of the Medusa and only saved by turning away and covering his eyes. The interpretation of the passage is debatable; clearly the threat of despair—a fear that blinds the soul to God's mercy and deprives it of hope—is involved. Whether, as John Freccero has recently argued, a rejection by Dante of the petrose is also implied, there is no doubt that Petrarch did connect the petrose with the traditional interpretations of that his countless allusions to the petrose are to be connected with his references to the Medusa. The Medusan tranformation most frequently alluded to is that of Atlas. Petrarch combines references to Ovid's account with allusions to Virgil's description (Aeneid 4.246-251), a projection of Aeneas' immobile fixation on Dido, as in 366.111-112, where the dripping tears are suggested by the rivers in Virgil's anthropomorphic description. Petrarch's allusions to the Medusa are often implicit, as in poem 129, where they are related to the themes of memory and writing; the parallels with 125 and 126 are perhaps more obvious than the equally important connection with the myths of Daphne and Actaeon:

   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.
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.
(129.40-52)

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. 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.

It is not merely the idea of petrifaction that establishes the connection with the rime petrose and the Medusa, it is such phrases as "sopra l'erba verde" (compare "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," lines 28, 39), "stella che 'l sol copre col raggio" ("Io son venuto al punto de la rota," lines 5-6); "quando il vero sgombra / quel dolce error" ("Io son venuto," lines 10-11); "pur lì medesmo assido / me freddo, pietra morta in pietra viva" ("Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," lines 33-34, 57; "Al poco giorno," line 34). The central idea of the passage, that meditation on Laura's image is in tension with the wildness of the surroundings, is related to the situation of "Io son venuto," just as the theme of the projection of the image of the lady onto the external world is related to "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," lines 40-43:

per che ne li occhi sì bella mi luce
quando la miro, ch'io la veggio in petra,
e po' in ogni altro ov' io volga mia luce.

so beautiful into my eyes she shines
when I gaze on her, that I see her in stones
and in everything else, wherever I turn my
sight.

The lover is fascinated with the complexity of his own psychological processes; the image that turns him to stone in the Rime sparse is a projection of them onto the outside world. The idea that the lover's fixated gaze on the beloved turns him into a statue is emphasized in Ovid's account of Narcissus, who stares at his image in the pool:

… vultuque immotus eodem
haeret, ut a Pario formatum marmore signum.
(Metamorphoses 3.418-419)

he stares unmoving on that one face, like a statue formed of Parian marble.

This is an ultimate form of the Medusa, a perception that hovers over the Rime sparse, that endlessly polished mirror of the poet's soul. The charge of a fundamental narcissism in the collection (as in Petrarch's entire output) would be only partially answered by the undeniable intensity of his self-criticism. He rather tends to avoid making explicit the presence of Narcissus in the mythic networks he weaves. But the two extremes of poem 23, Daphne and Actaeon, like the other myths in the poem, converage on and point toward the figure of Narcissus: at the midpoint of 23 there is a curious breakdown and a decision to omit certain things (the break occurs exactly at line 89, in the midst of the Battus passage, where the lover is turned to stone), and soon after he recounts how he has reenacted the myth of Echo. But Echo, after all, wasted away because of her love for Narcissus, and the implicit connection (Petrarch = Echo means Laura = Narcissus; if Laura's image = Narcissus' image, Petrarch = Narcissus) is both established and evaded. In the working papers of poem 23 there is evidence that completing the poem was difficult for Petrarch. On the recto of leaf 11 of Vat. Lat. 3196 lines 1-89 are written in a book hand as a fair copy; on the verso of leaf 11 are lines 90-169, in a cursive hand as a working draft. The verso has seven major instances of revision; the recto has two. The marginal notes indicate that work on the poem continued over a number of years. It may well be that the sensitivity of the nexus Battus-Medusa-Narcissus-Echo (in a poem beginning with Daphne and ending with Actaeon) caused Petrarch's difficulty.

In any case, the myths constantly blend into one another, and Petrarch expects us to bring a detailed knowledge of them to his poems. Poem 23 is echoed and balanced by poem 323, which describes six emblematic visions of Laura's death—a deer with a human face is killed by dogs, a ship sinks suddenly, a laurel is struck by lightning, the phoenix dies, a fountain is swallowed up by the earth, a lady is bitten in the heel by a snake—all instances of abrupt mutability. These myths and their order are related to those of poem 23. Poem 323 begins with an emblem similar to Actaeon, has the laurel at the center, and ends with a more realistic though not less symbolic emblem (the death of Eurydice), in which, as in the last myth of 23, the pathos is allowed to come through less masked. Each of the major emblems for Laura thus at some time or other also stands for the lover, and vice versa. If Laura is the laurel, the lover turns into a laurel; if she is the beautiful deer he is hunting, he is an Actaeon (and, again, in 323 she is torn by dogs); if he becomes a fountain of tears, she is a fountain of inspiration (but is it Narcissus' pool?); if like Echo he becomes merely a voice, she dies, and he is left to imagine her voice in dreams. The myths are constantly being transformed.

To see one's experience in terms of myth is to see in the myth the possibility of the kind of allegorical meaning that was called tropological. Petrarch knew and used freely the traditional allegorical interpretations of the Ovidian myths. But he dissociated them from clear-cut moral judgments, and in this he was closer to the Dante of the petrose than of the Commedia. To say that falling in love and becoming a love poet is a transformation into a laurel tree involves the sense that the channeling of the vital energy of frustrated love into the sublimated, eternizing mode of poetry has consequences not fully subject to conscious choice or to moral judgment. For Petrarch the perfection of literary form, which exists polished and unchanging on the page in a kind of eternity, is achieved only at the cost of the poet's natural life. His vitality must be metamorphosed into words, and this process is profoundly ambiguous. If on the one hand Petrarch subscribes to—even in a sense almost singlehandedly founds—the humanistic cult of literary immortality and glory, on the other hand he has an acute awareness that writing poetry involves a kind of death. This recognition has something very modern about it; it gives a measure of the distance that separates Petrarch from Dante, who gambled recklessly on the authority his poem would have as a total integration. Petrarch is always calling attention to the psychologically relative, even suspect, origin of individual poems and thus of writing itself. His hope is that ultimately the great theme of praise will redeem even the egotism of the celebrant.