CLASS COMMENTARIES ON PETRARCHIST SONNETS

1. Commentary on sonnets 15 by Petrarch, 17 by Garcilaso, and 71 by Ronsard.

The unifying theme of these sequences of sonnets is the topic of the lover’s suffering and melancholy. We must start by remembering that the whole of the Canzoniere of Petrarch is based on three or four seminal tenets, one of which is the analysis of the personal emotion aroused by the experience of love. This experience is seen as contradictory and problematic, for it is the source of both joy and pain. But this does not only stems from the conjunction of both feelings in the same experience, but also from the double-edged character of each of them. I.e, sadness is a source of joy and joy is, in turn, is intensely close to sadness (Petrarch himself named this state of affairs as “dolendi voluptas”). So viewed, the public exposure and recreation (as a literary topic) of the lover’s melancholy is a hoard of fine sentimental pleasure which would not cease to grow during the aftermath of the Petrarchistic wave (see, for instance the sentimentalism of late Neo-classicism, Pre-romanticism, and Romanticism). From Petrarch onwards, the public exposure of the intimacies of grief and melancholy, what we may aptly term, “the lover’s melancholy”, become elegant and socially decorous, as part of the poet’s expected display of feelings, in order to obtain the benevolent understanding of the audience (remember Sonnet 1 “Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono”). The mark of this trend is clearly seen in the three sonnets under scrutiny, though with a more clear-cut deviation of the norm in the case of Ronsard. We might have chosen English sonnets exemplifying this feature as well (notably enough in The Tottel Miscellany, 1557, there are several poems entitled to the fashion of “Descripcion of the restlesse state of a louer, with sute to his ladie, to rue on his diyng hart”), but I have preferred to limit the selection so as not to overburden you with more sonnets. Notwithstanding, you may well notice the final couplets of Sonnet 34 by Spenser in the next comparison of sonnets (“Till then I wander carefull comfortless, / In secret sorrow and sad pensivenesse”) in which the Petrarchistic topic of the wandering and solitude-seeking lover resolves in a minor key the otherwise Petrarchan maritime conceit of the wandering ship with a conventional appeal to self-pity exhibited before the audience.

In the case of Petrarch, with his characteristic intellectual and ratiocinative formulation of the argument and his meditative and soft tone, there is a movement from the display of emotional exclamation in the octave to the ratiocinative inquiry introduced by the corresponding doubt and question “Talor m'assale in mezzo a’ tristi pianti / un dubbio: come posson queste membra / da lo spirito lor viver lontane? There is a switch from the emotional to the rationalisation of the emotional, a balance between the two ends, finally resolved by the intervention of love as a personified figure (remember the end of Sonnet 1 by Sidney: “Fool, said my Muse to me…”), with a rhetorical question that again underlines a slight movement back to the emotional within the ratiocinative: “Non ti rimembra / che questo é privilegio degli amanti, / sciolti da tutte qualitati humane?”. Here the poet seems to imply “Are you so stupid as to forget this fundamental principle of transcending love?” In the end we see that the sonnet is resolved in a nice turn of ingenuity, which already foreshadows thing to come long time after, such as, for instance, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne (anti-Petrarchistic in many respects, but a Petrarchist at heart) or even, in the 20th century, Robert Graves in “The Starred coverlet” (1), who, in a classicist mood, evokes in the final lines the privileged and unique experience of true lovers.

But you need not go so far to see the durable impact of Petrarchism and this topic which, as I have already hinted at above, ends up in the subtopic of the privileges of true lovers (they transcend their grossness, their own individuality and live, believe it or not, in a dissociation of soul (which remains with the beloved) and body (“queste membra”) which follows their own (and forced) way after the separation from the beloved. Of course, I presuppose that you have already understood the literal sense of the sonnet and some of its basic conventions: Petrarch is here suggesting a departure from the beloved, a separation, an eloinment. He has perhaps passed her on the way (the real situation does not matter) and he is looking back at her while he goes on, feeling the pains of the separation and trying to preserve the presence of the beloved in his mind. But perhaps it is a more general situation: the poet refers to the course of his life with his characteristic bent on moral evaluation, and retrospective (we have seen that sometimes it is prospective as well) look. There, only the love of Laura supplies him with some brief consolation. In any case, the sad musings for the absence of Laura (“al dolce ben ch’io lasso”) and the moral regret of both deprivation and sense of futility provoke an “attack” of grief. Being so deprived (indeed so deprived that his souls remains with the lady and the lover is reduced to the state of a walking corpse, a Petrarchistic commonplace) how can he go on living? The answer is somewhat unexpected: by loving and suffering, by persevering in the doctrine of love, he is beyond the normal range of human experience for the better and for the worse. By a miracle of love (a concept dear to Donne) his uninhabited and dejected self can go on living whereas his soul remains with the beloved. Thus, another topic is shown here: the absolute dejection of the lover, who is all dependant on the beloved, so dependant that even his soul is her exclusive property.

This topic of the dejection of the lover and his deprivation is implicit in Garcilaso’s sonnet 17. The narrator here has come to so much misfortune, as expressed throughout, as a direct consequence of his vassalage to the beloved. But, of course, the main theme which coincides with that of Petrarch dealt with in the first place above, is the showing of her grief. There is less melancholy, for the writing of Garcilaso is more given to clear-cut delineations, and the use of oxymoronic short phrasing precludes a slow rhythm appropriate for wording melancholy. But there is a lot of manly sadness, and the poem, too, ends up in a minor key, suitable for and giving way to a certain melancholy mood in the final tercet (there is some melancholy mixed with moral regret and dissatisfaction in lines 3-4, too). In a less expletive and more argumentative exposition of his state he softly expresses the sad anguish of the person who wants to exhaust time as the only way to escape his spiritual suffering. Otherwise, the resource to the public exposure of his grief as an acceptable literary theme is to be counted as pertaining to the Petrarchistic tradition. It is remarkable, however, that Garcilaso uses to his advantage a great deal of the usual Petrarchist arsenal of oxymora in the second quatrain. In the sestet the mood is more argumentative and passes form oxymoron to the classical comparison sleep = death, neatly delineated by the implication (“aquella parte”) that there are other sedative, restoring qualities of sleep whose beneficial effects do not reach the poet. The first tercet leads naturally to the minor key (the Petrarchan key I would say) in which Garcilaso finally ends his sonnet. What we can see in Garcilaso, however, is part of the accretions that a century and a half of Petrarchist practice had brought about to the initial code of Il Canzoniere: catalogues or blazons, cupids or amoretti, the topic of the kiss or bassius, a more clear-cut and strong, or ingenuous or extravagant conception of the conceit, and so on. Other pervasive influences of the Petrarchistic tradition include the self-commiseration of the dejected lover: cf. the vocabulary of pity in both sonnets: “gran pena”, “Oimè lasso”; “tanta desventura”, “estrecho”, “amarga y dura”, and the like; the reflective tone from the start: “Io mi rivolgo indietro…”, which as I have remarked can be understood in a general, intellectual sense, and “Pensando que el camino iba derecho…”; the retrospective look and moral evaluation (in many sonnets by Petrarch and not necessarily in this one; and the verbal and situational echoes such as “y duro campo de batalla el lecho”, which shows itself as an apt transference to the war-like context of Garcilaso’s experience but owes something to his vernacular influences (the Spanish Cancionero,[1] included), but that immediately suggest an echo of the Petrarchan “letticciuol” (little bed), which is the intimate locus of love unrest in some of Petrarch’s pieces in the Canzoniere. It also reminds us of the conventional topos “Pace non trovo…” (Sonnet 134) expressed in Wyatt by the title “I find no peace” of one of his poems.

Ronsard’s sonnet deals basically with the same topoi and conventions, but, of course, according to his context and tradition. He, as the Pléyade in general, is well-known for assimilating the Petrarchistic tradition through the developments received both from the fifteenth and early sixteenth Italian Petrarchists and from the early adaptation of this movement into French (Clément Marot). To this is to be added the rediscovery of the Greek (and Latin poets) with the Greek Anthology (1494) and the renewal of the study of Greek in Italy and France. Notably, there is a more earthly, sensual and rational (typically French?) view of the experience of love in Ronsard, as evinced in the fact that he constructs sequences of love sonnets devoted to more tan one lady and, in this respect, contrary to the general trend in Petrach (Laura), Garcilaso (Isabel Freire), Sidney (Penelope Devereux), or Spenser (Elizabeth Boyle). In the case of Ronsard his series of sonnets Les Amours grow steadily from 1552 to 1578 while switching from one beloved to another: Cassandre in Les Amours of 1552, Marie in Continuation (1555) and Nouvelle Continuation des amours (1560), and Hélène in Sonnets pour Hélène (1578), the actual series of which this sonnet and the other in the syllabus form part of. As for his rational bias, witness lines 8 to 14: after a full Petrarchist beginning, the poet resorts to an abstract debate of medieval extraction with his own reason, concluding in a rather soft invective against it: “Qui te dira divine, il ne aira pas bien”. The presence of the beloved and of a specific concern with love or feeling is displaced by the “philosophical”, abstract debate. This debate, on the other hand, reminds one immediately not only of the medieval debate, such as can be seen in Le roman de la rose (13th century), but, as it is the case in Le roman de la rose too, with the medieval allegory, and more specifically with the allegorical technique of the moralities, plays of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in which the faculties and senses of man (judgement, reason, five wits, the soul) and different vices and virtues are personified contending for the control of the soul. Typically in Le roman de la rose, in several English moralities (The Castle of Perseverance) or in some medieval lyrics (“The knight knocked at the castle door”) the object of dispute (the rose of feminity or the soul of man) are presented in the centre of a stronghold or castle besieged or sought after by enemies / suitors. This and no other is the source of the conceit constructed by Ronsard from line 7 onwards. Reason is besieged by the charms of the lady. Well considered, the enemies (i.e., “une oeillade, une main, un petit ris”) should be easy to repulse. But heart is a traitor inside and reason too quick to flee, and thus the lover is left defenceless at the disposal of the beloved-enemy, or in Petrarch’s words the “dolce nemica”. The consequence of all this, rather ineffectual by the way, is the final injunction against reason (“Qui te dira divine, il ne aira pas bien”), a sort of qualified and pale complaint since only indirectly does it show concern with the lady. The first six lines, however, display a typically Petrarchistic air. All the commonplaces and resources of this tradition are there and can be related to the dominant topic which we are examining here: the display of self-pity, of commiseration before the reader, if only for lines 3-5. But we can distinguish more typical Petrarchistic traits in these six lines: the reflective tone, the moral evaluation, the oxymoronic expressions, Petrarchan set phrases (cf. “…quand je pense aux traverses d'amour”, 32. “Quanto piú m’avicino al giorno extremo”, 298. “Quand’io mi volgo indietro a mirar gli anni…”, 18. “Quand’io son tutto volto in quella parte”, 5. “Quand’io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi; “Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado”), the topic already dealt with of the renunciation or farewell to love, the helplessness of the lover whose reason is impotent against love,. the typical Petrarchan splitting of personality, by which the poet addresses or converses with inner faculties such as reason, as is the case here, or external entities such as personified love, but, notably, the very song he is sending to his beloved in the old provençal form of the envoi. There is even the commonplace of the complaining day and sighing night (cf. “la noche clara para mí es escura” in sonnet 17 of Garcilaso and of course to several pieces of Petrarch himself). And so on and so forth. A main and final difference which I should like to highlight, however, is that this poem by Ronsard is the only one under study that is directly addressed to the lady, a idiosyncratic trait of Ronsard that, in general in the Sonnets pour Hélène uses this resource of the direct address to the lady much more frequently than the others. The insistence on this resource gives Ronsard a clear smack of the poetry of the troubadours, with their presentation” of direct and immediate courting of the lady. Indeed, in this sonnet in particular and in the others in general, Ronsard is more interested in succeeding in his courting of the lady, in physically enjoying her, than in the spiritual and moral consequences of the quest for unrequited love. I have already pointed out that for Ronsard the erotic dimension (no matter how unsuccessful it turned out in the end), the “joie de vivre” taken from The Greek anthology with his Pindaric odes but also from his native French soil makes a difference.

There is still an important question which could be addressed here: the study of how the rhyming structure of the different kinds of sonnets (Italian-Spanish, French and English) impinge on the exposition or unfolding of the content. You can notice the following structures:

Petrarch’s sonnet 15: ABBA, ABBA, CDE, DCE

Garcilaso’s sonnet 17: ABBA, ABBA, CDE, CDE

Ronsard sonnet 71: ABBA, ABBA, CCD, EED

Now I leave it for you to determine which effects if any are produced by the use of this changing rhyming structures in the tercets, and, above all, which would be the relation between the conventional parts of the sonnet (quatrains and tercets or octave and sestet) and the development of the argument, story, piece of descriptive state or anything content displayed whatsoever. Remember that in the case of English sonnets there is conventional a structure with a varying disposition of rhymes but always ending in a couplet, which makes us to customarily use the terms (three) quatrains and a final couplet.

NOTE

(1)

Robert Graves

The Starred Coverlet

A difficult achievement for true lovers

Is to lie mute, without embrace or kiss,

Without a rustle or a smothered sigh,

Basking each in the other's glory.

Let us not undervalue lips or arms

As reassurances of constancy,

Or speech as necessary communication

When troubled heart go groping through the dusk;

Yet lovers who have learned this last refinement ―

To lie apart, yet sleep and dream together

Motionless under their starred coverlet ―

Crown love with wreaths of myrtle.

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[1] Not to be confused with Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Basicallly, The Cancionero is the title given to the several and successive compilation of courtly (and sometimes also popular) pieces of poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth century poems