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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch," the celebrated Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca intricately weaves together themes of love, nature, and human emotion, encapsulated in a lyrical style that masterfully fuses medieval motifs with emerging humanist ideals. Known for his sonnet sequence dedicated to Laura, Petrarch employs vivid imagery and emotional depth, crafting a poetic form that has influenced countless writers. Each poem serves not merely as a personal reflection but as a broader commentary on the human condition, marking a turning point in European literature that emphasizes individual experience and lyrical expression. Francesco Petrarca was not only a poet but also a scholar, often regarded as the 'father of Humanism.' His profound admiration for classical antiquity and the complexities of his personal life, especially his unrequited love for Laura, profoundly informed his poetic vision. This blend of personal sentiment with philosophical inquiry reflects the cultural shift of the Renaissance, prompting readers to explore the interplay between love, beauty, and mortality. This collection is essential for readers interested in the foundation of modern poetry and the evolution of emotional expression in literature. Petrarch's exploration of longing not only resonates with those seeking a deeper understanding of love's complexities but also offers insight into the intersection of the personal and the universal, making it a compelling read for both scholars and poetry enthusiasts. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume brings together, within a single authorial frame, the most celebrated vernacular poetry of Francesco Petrarca alongside a concise apparatus designed to orient the reader. Its purpose is twofold: to present a substantial gathering of the lyric corpus traditionally associated with Laura, and to place beside it the visionary cycle known as the Triumphs. By joining poems, biographical materials, and indexes, the collection offers a coherent entry into Petrarch’s achievement as poet and humanist. It invites sustained reading of the sequence as an artistic whole while also accommodating selective consultation of individual lyrics, themes, and forms.
The contents are arranged to guide both first-time readers and returning admirers. Preliminary materials—the Preface, List of Plates, Chronological Summary of Petrarch’s Life, and a fuller Life—establish context. The principal body comprises Petrarch’s Italian lyrics grouped as To Laura in Life and To Laura in Death, followed by Petrarch’s Triumphs, and closed by a Sonnet found in Laura’s tomb and an Index. In this order, the volume mirrors a long editorial tradition: lyric fragments clustered around the figure of Laura and, thereafter, an allegorical meditation that widens personal experience into public, even cosmic, perspective.
While a single-author collection, the book contains a range of literary types. The core is lyric poetry in several Italian forms: sonnets, canzoni, sestine, ballate, and madrigali. Accompanying these are paratexts of a historical and interpretive cast—the chronological outline and the biographical life—useful for situating the poems within Petrarch’s career. The Triumphs constitute a sustained allegorical sequence distinct from the shorter lyrics. No novels or plays appear here; instead, the selection concentrates on the vernacular poetry that shaped European lyric traditions, enhanced by editorial supports that aid understanding without displacing the primacy of Petrarch’s own texts.
Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) occupies a foundational place in European letters as a poet and early humanist. Celebrated in his lifetime—he was crowned poet laureate at Rome in 1341—he wrote widely in Latin and in the Tuscan vernacular. The lyrics gathered here are often known collectively as the Canzoniere, or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, and are closely linked to the figure of Laura. Their arrangement into poems “in life” and “in death” reflects the received organization of this tradition, emphasizing continuity and change across time. The Triumphs broaden the focus to allegorical processions that examine love, virtue, mortality, fame, and eternity.
The Laura sequence embraces themes of desire, restraint, memory, and repentance, rendered with striking psychological nuance. Readers encounter an introspective “I” attentive to the conflict between worldly attachment and spiritual aspiration, between the allure of beauty and the claims of conscience. Natural imagery—breezes, waters, hills—frames states of mind; the changing seasons trace the passage of time; and the laurel motif resonates with the name Laura and the laureate’s crown. Rather than narrating events, these poems register recurring states of feeling and thought, letting variation within fixed forms produce an evolving meditation on constancy and change.
Stylistically, Petrarch’s hallmark is refined balance and musicality. Antithesis and oxymoron crystallize divided emotion; precise diction and poised syntax maintain clarity even amid turbulence. The sonnet, in particular, bears his imprint: an octave and sestet often pivot at a rhetorical turn, the volta, to deepen or recast a thought. Across forms, he cultivates an expressive economy that rewards close attention to sound, rhythm, and logical progression. Such craftsmanship underlies the enduring “Petrarchan” model—less a set of rigid rules than a poetics of inwardness, proportion, and modulation that later poets would adapt to languages and contexts beyond Italian.
In the section To Laura in Life, the living presence of Laura is a constant measure of hope and limit. The poet’s stance alternates between bold avowal and tactful restraint, often staging a dialogue within the self—confidence checked by reverence, desire tempered by ethical concern. The variety of forms intensifies this inner drama: sonnets compress argument, canzoni amplify reflection, sestine elaborate patterns of return. Rather than a linear story, one finds a sequence of approaches to the same luminous center, each attempt reframing affection and awe. The result is a portrait of love as discipline, discovery, and trial.
The section To Laura in Death contemplates absence, grief, and the work of remembrance. Here the voice grows more austere and meditative, testing the promise that loss may yield insight. Time’s ravages are faced without evasion, yet the poems seek composure in measure and form. Memory becomes a moral faculty: recalling former devotion, reassessing motive, and orienting desire toward higher ends. Without diminishing earthly attachment, the sequence asks how love might be purified by mourning. The prevailing tone is sober and exacting, extending the earlier themes into a reflection on finitude, consolation, and the search for peace.
Petrarch’s Triumphs shift from lyric interiority to an allegorical pageant. In successive visions—Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, Eternity—personified forces advance in symbolic processions, each overcoming the last. The design allows the poet to gauge the scope and limits of human pursuits: passion yields to virtue, life to mortality, renown to the ages, and time itself to what endures beyond it. The imagery is ceremonial and emblematic, the movement cumulative. While distinct from the intimate mode of the sonnets, the sequence extends their ethical inquiry, proposing that the measure of human aspiration is discovered in a larger order.
As a whole, the collection has proved decisive for later literature. Petrarch’s sonnet practice set a durable example for vernacular poetries, and his introspective stance became a model for lyric self-examination. The balanced architecture of octave and sestet, the art of the turn, and the tactful rhetoric of praise and reserve informed the development of the sonnet tradition across Europe. Equally, the allegorical imagination of the Triumphs offered a framework for meditating on history and value. Together, these works helped define both the resources of form and the possibilities of inwardness for centuries of readers and writers.
The ancillary materials here serve clarity and perspective. The Chronological Summary and the Life of Petrarch provide an outline of events and a reading of character, helping to situate the poems without reducing them to biography. The List of Plates signals visual aids that contextualize places, persons, or motifs. The Index offers readers a means to navigate titles, forms, and themes across a large body of lyrics. Because the poems are not strictly chronological, these guides assist in grasping patterns of recurrence, development, and contrast, ensuring that orientation complements rather than constrains individual acts of reading.
Taken together, The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch offers a carefully framed encounter with a poet whose language still feels lucid and searching. The arrangement honors the lyric fragments addressed to Laura and the allegorical sweep of the Triumphs, closing with a sonnet traditionally associated with Laura’s tomb. The effect is cumulative: a movement from private devotion through bereavement to broader meditations on time and value. Readers will find not a single narrative but an art of revisitation—forms returning to themes, themes deepening within forms—by which Petrarch’s voice achieves its distinctive gravity and lasting appeal.
Author Biography
Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) was an Italian poet and scholar whose work helped inaugurate Renaissance humanism. Writing in both polished Latin and the Tuscan vernacular, he cultivated a model of learned eloquence rooted in classical antiquity and personal introspection. His lyric sequence commonly called the Canzoniere set the template for the European sonnet tradition, while his Latin prose and epic projects advanced philology, moral reflection, and historical imagination. Moving between courts, libraries, and contemplative retreats, Petrarch fashioned a life that joined public honor to private study. His name became emblematic of a renewal of letters that valued ancient authors as guides to virtue and expressive style.
Born in Arezzo and raised partly near the papal court at Avignon, Petrarch received a legal education at Montpellier and Bologna. The training gave him command of rhetoric and dialectic, but he soon abandoned a legal career for poetry and classical studies. Taking minor clerical orders provided stability while he sought patrons and assembled books. The Latin of Cicero and the moral voice of Augustine shaped his taste and aims, encouraging a return to elegant style and inward examination. In the 1320s and 1330s he began to form the network—copyists, correspondents, and fellow readers—that supported a lifetime of manuscript hunting and literary experimentation.
During years spent in and around Avignon, with periodic retreats to Vaucluse, Petrarch developed the Italian lyrics later collected as the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, or Canzoniere. The poems revolve around the figure he calls Laura and explore desire, repentance, time, and fame in sonnets, canzoni, and other forms. Their supple diction and balanced syntax helped consolidate Tuscan as a literary language, alongside Dante and Boccaccio. He also composed the allegorical Trionfi, envisioning successive triumphs such as Love, Death, Fame, and Eternity. While the vernacular works earned wide admiration, Petrarch regarded his Latin writings as the core of his scholarly vocation.
Petrarch’s Latin production was extensive. The epic Africa celebrates Scipio Africanus; Secretum stages a dialogue with Augustine on the conflict between worldly glory and salvation; De vita solitaria and De remediis utriusque fortunae reflect on ethical choices and the uses of solitude; De viris illustribus offers moralized portraits of notable figures. His letters—Epistolae familiares and Seniles—include the Letter to Posterity and, famously, an account of climbing Mont Ventoux as a meditation on scripture and self-knowledge. In the mid-1340s he located in Verona a cache of Cicero’s letters to Atticus and others, an event that spurred new efforts in textual recovery and criticism.
Petrarch’s stature was recognized with a coronation as poet laureate in Rome in 1341, a rare revival of an ancient honor. Thereafter he undertook diplomatic and advisory missions for influential patrons, including the Colonna, while continuing to compose and revise. He traveled widely across Italy and beyond to visit libraries, meet rulers and scholars, and exchange manuscripts. A sustained friendship with Giovanni Boccaccio fostered mutual encouragement and the circulation of texts. Despite his public engagements, Petrarch cultivated a posture of independence, dividing his time between civic centers—at times Milan, Padua, and Venice—and quieter refuges suited to reading, writing, and study.
Across genres, Petrarch argued that humane letters refine judgment and character. He praised the studia humanitatis—grammar, rhetoric, history, moral philosophy, and poetry—as disciplines that revive antiquity’s eloquence for Christian ends. Skeptical of scholastic technicalities, he defended classical Latin style in works such as De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia. His poetry and prose return to recurring tensions: love and duty, fame and humility, action and contemplation. The confessional voice of Secretum, the consolatory tone of De remediis, and the elegiac introspection of the Canzoniere gave later writers models for fusing moral inquiry with artistry, inviting readers to measure themselves against time and eternity.
In the later 1360s and early 1370s Petrarch resided chiefly in northern Italy, maintaining correspondence, revising manuscripts, and receiving visitors. He died in the Euganean Hills at Arquà, where a monumental tomb soon signaled his fame. His legacy is double: as a scholar who helped create the methods and ideals of Renaissance humanism, and as a lyric poet whose sonnet sequence inspired Petrarchism from Italy to France, England, and Spain. Generations of writers adapted his themes and forms, while editors and philologists learned from his zeal for accurate texts. Today he is read for stylistic mastery and for a probing exploration of conscience.
Historical Context
Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), born at Arezzo to exiled Florentines, shaped a poetics that straddles medieval devotion and emerging humanism. The collection commonly known as the Canzoniere and the Trionfi, here accompanied by biographical and editorial materials, gathers poems composed and revised over four decades, largely in the Avignon and Italian spheres. Its arc, divided into lyrics to Laura in life and in death, together with the allegorical Triumphs, mirrors the century’s turmoil—plague, ecclesiastical dislocation, civic war—while forging an interior narrative of memory, desire, and repentance. The sequence, fluid across Petrarch’s lifetime, offers not a diary but a crafted monument in which private experience converses with public history.
The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377) forms the political and moral backdrop of many poems. Petrarch grew up at Carpentras near Avignon, later keeping a retreat at Vaucluse on the Sorga. From this proximity arose his ambivalent intimacy with the curia’s brilliance and its corruption. In invectives that call Avignon a new Babylon, such as the cluster around sonnets CV–CVII, he condemns luxury and greed under Benedict XII and Clement VI, even as he benefits from ecclesiastical patronage. The critique lends historical charge to otherwise personal lyrics, tying love and conscience to a wider crisis of authority at the heart of Latin Christendom’s displaced capital.
Italian politics, fractured by Guelf–Ghibelline feuds and the predation of mercenary companies, haunt Petrarch’s civic imagination. In the canzone Italia mia he pleads for peace among the peninsula’s city-states, a plea resonant with his travels between Parma, Verona, Milan, Padua, and Venice. The dramatic experiment of Cola di Rienzo’s tribunate in 1347 inspires the epistolary and lyric portrait Spirto gentil, where hope for Roman renewal flickers before disappointment. Names embedded in the poems—Colonna, Orso dell’Anguillara—record real alliances: patrons who tethered the poet to Roman and curial networks while reminding him that the laurel crown could not redeem the peninsula’s disunity.
Petrarch’s reputation rests equally on his Latin scholarship and his Italian verse. In 1341 he accepted the poet’s laurel on the Roman Capitol, after scholarly examinations by King Robert of Anjou at Naples and by Roman authorities. The ceremony proclaimed a revival of ancient literary dignity and frames the vernacular sequence’s pursuit of fame. In 1345 at Verona he discovered Cicero’s letters to Atticus, Quintus, and Brutus, a catalytic moment in European humanism. The Triumphs—Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, Eternity—adopt the Roman triumph as a contemplative structure, staging the procession of temporal goods toward their ultimate eclipse, and yoking classical forms to spiritual reckoning.
The collection stabilizes the Tuscan lyric as a European model. Petrarch adapts forms refined by the dolce stil novo and by Occitan troubadours: sonnet, canzone, sestina, ballata, and madrigal. His sonnets typically shape the octave with ABBA ABBA and vary the sestet; his canzoni widen argument and music; his sestine recycle end-words with virtuoso constraint. Rhetorical economy, enjambed syntax, and antithesis foster an introspective voice. Myth and Scripture speak through a Tuscan idiom that later poets across Italy, France, Spain, and England emulated, making the Rime sparse the portable grammar of desire, penitence, and praise from courts to convents and from manuscript to print.
No single historical moment encloses the sequence; instead, decades of revision created an interior chronology. Petrarch ordered and re-ordered poems drafted in Avignon and Vaucluse, reshaped in Parma, Verona, and Milan under the Visconti (1353–1361), and later retouched in Padua, Venice, and at Arquà, where he died in 1374. Autograph and authoritative manuscripts record cancellations, transpositions, and fresh glosses, revealing a poet who treated the book as a living organism. Such fluidity lets early political and moral anxieties converse with late meditations on time, making the prefaces, chronological summaries, and editorial apparatus in modern editions an echo of Petrarch’s own curatorial labor.
The Black Death of 1348, which ravaged Avignon and much of Europe, reoriented the poet’s design. Laura’s death—dated by Petrarch to 6 April 1348—catalyzed the transition from In vita to In morte, intensifying themes of transience and judgment. Social devastation, mass burials, and the curia’s panic color the elegiac register of sonnets and canzoni that follow, while the Triumph of Death translates epidemic experience into allegory. Lament becomes ethical instruction: to read the tender catalogues of seasons, breezes, and springs after 1348 is to feel their beauty sharpened by loss, the civil project of Italia mia deepened by mortality’s universal arithmetic.
Augustinian self-scrutiny shapes the sequence’s currents of desire and remorse. Petrarch’s Secretum imagines a dialogue with Augustine about glory and love, and that unresolved conversation threads the Canzoniere. Poems such as I’ vo piangendo i miei passati tempi take up penitential rhetoric, yet they remain bound to the sensory world that makes repentance necessary. The Triumphs lead from Love to Eternity, a pedagogy in procession, staging the soul’s purgation by history. Rather than sealing a conversion, the architecture dramatizes vacillation—the alternation of prayer and relapse—so that lyric breath becomes a moral chronicle, continuous with the civic and ecclesiastical crises that press upon the poet.
Classical learning saturates the vernacular with mythic shorthand. Apollo and Daphne shadow the Laura–laurel pun; Ovidian metamorphosis supplies figures for desire’s volatility; Virgil’s gravity frames meditation on empire, exile, and fama. The Triumphs parade exempla from Greek and Roman history beside biblical righteous and rulers, an encyclopedia in motion. Such allusions are not ornamental. They propose analogies between the poet’s conflicted will and the moral fortunes of exemplars, while testing the authority of antiquity against Christian teleology. The poems’ texture thus locates private longing inside a longue durée where crowns tarnish, cities fall, and only the final Triumph refuses time’s corrosion.
Landscape, travel, and place anchor the inward drama. The Sorga at Vaucluse lends a hydrology of memory to Chiare, fresche e dolci acque; Zefiro torna modulates seasonal cycles into an affective calendar; rivers and roads—Arno, Po, Tiber; Parma to Verona; Avignon to Rome—chart the itinerary of a working scholar who moves between courts and retreats. The celebrated ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 becomes a moral emblem in prose and verse, threading natural curiosity with scriptural recall. Windows, breezes, and light recur as optical thresholds, staging the encounter of eye and image while making geography into a map of conscience.
Patronage and friendship braid the poems into a social web. The Colonna household offered early shelter and clerical preferment; Cardinal Giovanni Colonna’s circle placed Petrarch within Romanist politics. The laurel in 1341 came with the Roman senator Orso dell’Anguillara’s support, his name echoing within the sequence. Later, the Visconti of Milan and the Carrara of Padua extended protection that both enabled and compromised the poet’s civic ideals. Friendships—Boccaccio in Florence, Sennuccio del Bene, and the musician Lodewijk Heyligen (Socrates)—register in letters and lyrics by name. These ties help explain the poems’ oscillation between courtly polish and prophetic admonition.
Trecento song culture informs the collection’s forms beyond the sonnet. Ballate and madrigals, linked to dance and music, preserve traces of performance in courts and salons from Avignon to the Visconti court. The canzone, the period’s most ambitious lyric form, offered Petrarch a capacious stage for political admonition, philosophical argument, and intricate praise. Sestinas, inherited from Arnaut Daniel, exhibit formal asceticism that suits themes of compulsion and recurrence. Though the modern reader meets these poems as silent texts, their original life involved voice, memory, and communal audition, which the poet deliberately reengineers into an intimate, bookish audition within the ordered sequence.
The Trionfi adapt Roman spectacle to medieval moral pedagogy. Love’s chariot first subdues the world, only to be mastered by Chastity; Death conquers both; Fame seems to outlast Death, but Time topples Fame; Eternity silences Time. The pageants draw up exemplars from Alexander to Caesar and from biblical heroes to contemporary figures, including Laura, whose presence complicates allegory with personal grief. Composed and revised from the 1350s until Petrarch’s death, the poem cycles compress the century’s calamities into a consolatory architecture. They teach historical humility while promising that the last Triumph—beyond plague, faction, and vanity—contains the peace the lyrics crave.
Manuscript culture shaped the poems’ medieval and early Renaissance circulation. Scribes copied clustered sonnets and canzoni; Petrarch himself corrected and rearranged texts in multiple autographs. In the 1470s, Venetian presses began printing the Canzoniere and Trionfi, fixing, without finishing, what had been a mobile archive. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century petrarchism—Garcilaso in Spain, Ronsard and Du Bellay in France, Wyatt and Surrey in England—transposed his idiom across vernaculars, while Italian commentators codified his rhetoric. The wider apparatus in modern collections—preface, chronology, plates, index—extends that tradition, teaching readers to see an intimate lyric book as a public classic woven into European letters.
Contemporary science and cosmology furnish discreet frameworks for time and perception. Planetary motions, Venus and Mars, the errancy of Saturn, and eclipses pepper metaphors; fortune is astronomized. Scholastic optics, which linked vision to rays and species, underwrites the persistent drama of eyes and windows, glances as projectiles, and light that wounds. The calendar—Good Friday 1327 for Laura’s first appearance, April anniversaries, solstices, harvests—organizes inner weather. Such details bind personal affect to a shared medieval cosmos, where providence governs the spheres and yet human will—tested against habit, fama, and grace—remains accountable, a tension the collection resolves only in the Triumph of Eternity.
Gender, marriage, and virtue inform the poems’ ethics of love. Laura is celebrated as unassailable chastity—likely a married Avignonese gentlewoman, sometimes identified by later tradition as Laura de Noves, though unproven. Her constancy legitimates desire by disciplining it, allowing praise to mingle with moral trial. The Triumph of Chastity formalizes that ideal, but the sequence continually wrestles with the boundary between courtly service and spiritual idolatry. The rhetoric of hands, eyes, and veil observes decorum, registering the social world in which women’s honor governed access. Through loss and memory, Laura becomes both historical person and allegorical measure of the poet’s soul.
The nineteenth-century English anthology from which this table of contents is drawn reflects a modern phase of Petrarch’s reception: the desire to frame the poems with a Life, dates, plates, and indices that steer interpretation through biography and history. That apparatus echoes medieval and Renaissance habits of glossing but adds Romantic valuation of sincerity and landscape. Yet the historical contexts named across the book—Avignon, Rome, plague, humanism, Italian war—are those Petrarch inscribed in his own sequence. To read the Sonnets, Canzoni, Sestine, Madrigali, Ballate, and the Triumphs within that tapestry is to encounter a fourteenth century turning itself, page by page, into memory.
Synopsis (Selection)
PREFACE.
Introduces the edition’s aims, scope, and editorial principles, situating Petrarch’s lyrics and allegorical poems for modern readers.
LIST OF PLATES.
Enumerates and briefly describes the illustrations and engravings that accompany the volume.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY OF PETRARCH'S LIFE.
Presents a year-by-year timeline of Petrarch’s major life events, travels, patrons, and writings for quick reference.
THE LIFE OF PETRARCH.
A prose biography tracing Petrarch’s upbringing, education, Avignon years, love for Laura, travels and humanist networks, laurel coronation, and later life, concluding with his legacy.
TO LAURA IN LIFE (Sonnets, Canzoni, Sestine, Madrigali, Ballate).
A lyric sequence charting the poet’s first sight of Laura and the ensuing struggle between desire and conscience while she lives, set amid vivid nature, classical exempla, and self-scrutiny. Across varied forms, it records longing, jealousy, contrition, and intermittent resolve without definitive release.
TO LAURA IN DEATH (Sonnets, Canzoni, Sestine, Ballate).
Following Laura’s death, the sequence turns elegiac, transforming earthly love into memory and spiritual devotion. The poems meditate on mortality, repentance, time, and the hope of heavenly reunion as visions of Laura guide the poet toward piety.
PETRARCH'S TRIUMPHS (overall cycle).
A six-part allegorical procession in terza rima—Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, Eternity—in which each power conquers the last, charting a passage from human passion to the permanence of the divine.
THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE.
Love parades a host of mortals subdued by desire, including the narrator, to display his sovereignty over human hearts and achievement; Laura’s presence defines the poet’s captivity.
THE TRIUMPH OF CHASTITY.
Chastity, exemplified by Laura and classical figures, overcomes Love, redirecting passion into restraint and moral virtue.
THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH.
Death breaks the sway of both Love and Chastity by claiming Laura, provoking lament and reflection on life’s fragility and the soul’s fate.
THE TRIUMPH OF FAME.
Fame conquers Death by preserving names and deeds in collective memory through a procession of illustrious figures, though its limits are implied.
THE TRIUMPH OF TIME.
Time erodes Fame and all temporal things, underscoring universal change, decay, and the futility of worldly glory.
THE TRIUMPH OF ETERNITY.
Eternity defeats Time, offering a vision of divine permanence and beatitude beyond mutability, where true consolation and fulfillment reside.
SONNET FOUND IN LAURA'S TOMB.
An epitaphic sonnet that honors Laura’s chaste, blessed life and marks her resting place with idealized praise.
INDEX.
An alphabetical guide to names, subjects, and references within the volume to aid navigation.
SONNETS, CANZONI, &c.
A reference listing that organizes poems by form or first lines to facilitate cross-referencing within the collection.
The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch
PREFACE.
The present translation of Petrarch completes the Illustrated Library series of the Italian Poets emphatically distinguished as "I Quattro Poeti Italiani."
It is rather a singular fact that, while the other three Poets of this world-famed series—Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso—have each found several translators, no complete version of the fourth, and in Italy the most popular, has hitherto been presented to the English reader. This lacune becomes the more remarkable when we consider the great influence which Petrarch has undoubtedly exercised on our poetry from the time of Chaucer downwards.
The plan of the present volume has been to select from all the known versions those most distinguished for fidelity and rhythm. Of the more favourite poems, as many as three or four are occasionally given; while of others, and those by no means few, it has been difficult to find even one. Indeed, many must have remained entirely unrepresented but for the spirited efforts of Major Macgregor, who has recently translated nearly the whole, and that with great closeness both as to matter and form. To this gentleman we have to return our especial thanks for his liberal permission to make free use of his labours.
Among the translators will be found Chaucer, Spenser, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anna Hume, Sir John Harington, Basil Kennett, Anne Bannerman, Drummond of Hawthornden, R. Molesworth, Hugh Boyd, Lord Woodhouselee, the Rev. Francis Wrangham, the Rev. Dr. Nott, Dr. Morehead, Lady Dacre, Lord Charlemont, Capel Lofft, John Penn, Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Wrottesley, Miss Wollaston, J.H. Merivale, the Rev. W. Shepherd, and Leigh Hunt, besides many anonymous.
The order of arrangement is that adopted by Marsand and other recent editors; but to prevent any difficulty in identification, the Italian first lines have been given throughout, and repeated in an alphabetical index.
The Life of Petrarch prefixed is a condensation of the poet Campbell's two octavo volumes, and includes all the material part of that work.
York Street, Covent Garden,June 28, 1869.
LIST OF PLATES.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY OF PETRARCH'S LIFE.
THE LIFE OF PETRARCH.
The family of Petrarch was originally of Florence, where his ancestors held employments of trust and honour. Garzo, his great-grandfather, was a notary universally respected for his integrity and judgment. Though he had never devoted himself exclusively to letters, his literary opinion was consulted by men of learning. He lived to be a hundred and four years old, and died, like Plato, in the same bed in which he had been born.
Garzo left three sons, one of whom was the grandfather of Petrarch. Diminutives being customary to the Tuscan tongue, Pietro, the poet's father, was familiarly called Petracco, or little Peter. He, like his ancestors, was a notary, and not undistinguished for sagacity. He had several important commissions from government. At last, in the increasing conflicts between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines—or, as they now called themselves, the Blacks and the Whites—Petracco, like Dante, was obliged to fly from his native city, along with the other Florentines of the White party. He was unjustly accused of having officially issued a false deed, and was condemned, on the 20th of October, 1302, to pay a fine of one thousand lire, and to have his hand cut off, if that sum was not paid within ten days from the time he should be apprehended. Petracco fled, taking with him his wife, Eletta Canigiani, a lady of a distinguished family in Florence, several of whom had held the office of Gonfalonier.
Petracco and his wife first settled at Arezzo, a very ancient city of Tuscany. Hostilities did not cease between the Florentine factions till some years afterwards; and, in an attempt made by the Whites to take Florence by assault, Petracco was present with his party. They were repulsed. This action, which was fatal to their cause, took place in the night between the 19th and 20th days of July, 1304—the precise date of the birth of Petrarch.
During our poet's infancy, his family had still to struggle with an adverse fate; for his proscribed and wandering father was obliged to separate himself from his wife and child, in order to have the means of supporting them.
As the pretext for banishing Petracco was purely personal, Eletta, his wife, was not included in the sentence. She removed to a small property of her husband's, at Ancisa, fourteen miles from Florence, and took the little poet along with her, in the seventh month of his age. In their passage thither, both mother and child, together with their guide, had a narrow escape from being drowned in the Arno. Eletta entrusted her precious charge to a robust peasant, who, for fear of hurting the child, wrapt it in a swaddling cloth, and suspended it over his shoulder, in the same manner as Metabus is described by Virgil, in the eleventh book of the Æneid, to have carried his daughter Camilla. In passing the river, the horse of the guide, who carried Petrarch, stumbled, and sank down; and in their struggles to save him, both his sturdy bearer and the frantic parent were, like the infant itself, on the point of being drowned.
After Eletta had settled at Ancisa, Petracco often visited her by stealth, and the pledges of their affection were two other sons, one of whom died in childhood. The other, called Gherardo, was educated along with Petrarch. Petrarch remained with his mother at Ancisa for seven years.
The arrival of the Emperor, Henry VII., in Italy, revived the hopes of the banished Florentines; and Petracco, in order to wait the event, went to Pisa, whither he brought his wife and Francesco, who was now in his eighth year. Petracco remained with his family in Pisa for several months; but tired at last of fallacious hopes, and not daring to trust himself to the promises of the popular party, who offered to recall him to Florence, he sought an asylum in Avignon, a place to which many Italians were allured by the hopes of honours and gain at the papal residence. In this voyage, Petracco and his family were nearly shipwrecked off Marseilles.
But the numbers that crowded to Avignon, and its luxurious court, rendered that city an uncomfortable place for a family in slender circumstances. Petracco accordingly removed his household, in 1315, to Carpentras, a small quiet town, where living was cheaper than at Avignon. There, under the care of his mother, Petrarch imbibed his first instruction, and was taught by one Convennole da Prato as much grammar and logic as could be learned at his age, and more than could be learned by an ordinary disciple from so common-place a preceptor. This poor master, however, had sufficient intelligence to appreciate the genius of Petrarch, whom he esteemed and honoured beyond all his other pupils. On the other hand, his illustrious scholar aided him, in his old age and poverty, out of his scanty income.
Petrarch used to compare Convennole to a whetstone, which is blunt itself, but which sharpens others. His old master, however was sharp enough to overreach him in the matter of borrowing and lending. When the poet had collected a considerable library, Convennole paid him a visit, and, pretending to be engaged in something that required him to consult Cicero, borrowed a copy of one of the works of that orator, which was particularly valuable. He made excuses, from time to time, for not returning it; but Petrarch, at last, had too good reason to suspect that the old grammarian had pawned it. The poet would willingly have paid for redeeming it, but Convennole was so much ashamed, that he would not tell to whom it was pawned; and the precious manuscript was lost.
Petracco contracted an intimacy with Settimo, a Genoese, who was like himself, an exile for his political principles, and who fixed his abode at Avignon with his wife and his boy, Guido Settimo, who was about the same age with Petrarch. The two youths formed a friendship, which subsisted between them for life.
Petrarch manifested signs of extraordinary sensibility to the charms of nature in his childhood, both when he was at Carpentras and at Avignon. One day, when he was at the latter residence, a party was made up, to see the fountain of Vaucluse, a few leagues from Avignon. The little Francesco had no sooner arrived at the lovely landscape than he was struck with its beauties, and exclaimed, "Here, now, is a retirement suited to my taste,[1q] and preferable, in my eyes, to the greatest and most splendid cities."
A genius so fine as that of our poet could not servilely confine itself to the slow method of school learning, adapted to the intellects of ordinary boys. Accordingly, while his fellow pupils were still plodding through the first rudiments of Latin, Petrarch had recourse to the original writers, from whom the grammarians drew their authority, and particularly employed himself in perusing the works of Cicero. And, although he was, at this time, much too young to comprehend the full force of the orator's reasoning, he was so struck with the charms of his style, that he considered him the only true model in prose composition.
