Did the canzones of Francesco Petrarca's "Canzoniere" set the bar too high? And yet we try, please c/c...?

Question

My Beauty

My Beauty speaks to me in ancient tongues,
And cares not for the pleasure of my hours;
Hers is the ageless song of cloud-capped towers
In Ilium, and she lives in the strains
Of mournful pipes on long lost misty hills,
The fresh turned earth that makes a silent mound,
And fiery wheel to which the soul is bound;
Hers is the pleasure that is borne from pains
Insensitive to human plight; she wanes
And waxes like the raven moon, demands
I write her tale and then cuts off my hands,
Binds up the wounds, and after all complains
I am unfit to honor her in verse.
The one I love is both my boon and curse;

She is the newborn’s plaintive cry at dusk,
The banshee wail, the grinning mask of death;
She lives at the extremity of breath,
The alpha and omega, and between
The fateful quest begun and journey’s end,
In life that lotus-like blooms in the mire
And then in triumph, fated to expire,
Falls down to earth and in its wisdom bends,
She wryly grins at me, and then she sends
A plague of visions, drawn up from a well;
Like revenants arisen from a spell
With unfamiliar coins they cannot spend,
They stand upon the porches of my ear
And challenge me to just one time appear,

A poet fit to know how round they are,
How full of life they are that they might burst,
Despite their constant feeding die of thirst
Before the practiced art of one deft hand
Can write them into life eternally.
And so I must. My Beauty is all things,
The rose and thorn, the attar and the stings,
The stately mansion built on shifting sands,
The Northern Lights that shimmer and expand
Like rosy fingers clawing at the sky
And then, before dawn’s limpid light draws nigh,
Withdraw unheralded to unknown lands.
My Beauty is protector of them all,
And it is unannounced when she will call.

I’ve seen her footprint on the mountaintops
As surely as Peruzzi Chapel’s walls;
I’ve seen her face and heard her siren calls
In madrigals of ordinary things ―
The headlong, senseless rush of eager youth
That wakes one morn, a filigree of lines
Upon the brow, the eye without its shine;
The little blades of grass where dry leaves cling
As if there were a grace in tarrying;
The joyous hymns of softly milling choirs
Of gnats that teem on summer eves; the fire
All embers where a faint sweet warmth still clings ―
I do not know why she has chosen me,
Why it’s become my fated destiny

To see with eyes like those of other men
That yet are not the same as theirs at all
And have the same two ears, but hear the call
Of undivided nature beckon me.
Where other eyes in twain divide the field
Of sense and sound, the realm of passing sights,
My thought is strangely foreign and delights
In draughts of bittersweet poetically
Poured into one grand cup. Reality
Observes no rule, no boundary; it slides
Through narrow passageways, and graceful glides
Into the room and fills it. Poetry ―
My mistress and my Beauty, saving grace,
My eyes, my heart ― I know no other place.

She lives in windows like a candle lit
To lead a weary traveler back home
To places that he lives but has not seen,
But there is little solace in the gloam
Or salve to soothe the wounding of one’s wit,
And yet I welcome her, and crown her queen.

Answer 1

The intersections of form and matter make always for quaint and picturesque piazze, and most respecting odes, which the Italians call canzoni after the Provenzal. Let us say that the ode lives between order and chaos, because it possesses world enough and time for digression, as in a sonnet is lacking, but cannot change the topic with the ease of Ariosto or Byron, nor nod like Homer. Your canzone differs from the twenty-nine of Francesco Petrarca in its facility with allusions to Shakespeare, Keats, Hopkins, Tichborne, and Petrarca himself, but is similar in its penchant for variations on Dante and Homer. (The Northern Lights that shimmer and expand/Like rosy fingers clawing at the sky/And then, before dawn’s limpid light draws nigh,/ Withdraw unheralded to unknown lands.---- collect all four!) The canzoni of Petrarca range through a number of styles including penitential, hortative, nonsense (105), imagistic, narrative, allegorical, and disputational. What unifies his subsequence of canzoni is less the logical structure of fronte and sirma by a chiave connected and separated respectively in rhyme and thought (for example, 29 lacks this feature), but rather the intensity with which the sense of self exerts itself, more enduringly than in most of the sonnets and with more force than in the Convivio or Vita Nuova of Dante. The self of the Canzoniere is as Hamlet to Dante's Macbeth, in the sense that the `Petrarca' of the sequence is torn morally for causes which are more epistemological or ontological than they are ethical in origin-- when Petrarca wishes to address himself to ethical questions directly he writes in Latin. Your canzone differs from Petrarca's in that the semi-irreality of Laura is obliterated for a mode of address which is wholly allegorical, and in this sense more mediaeval. The sense of autos projected is full of formal longing, akin to Newton's image of himself on the beach, and filled of a sense of incomprehensible beauty. This is not much mitigated, as in Petrarca, by the pain or even despair of what we might amuse ourselves to call Aristotelian hylomorphism. In this way your canzone is very much of a piece with your other odes, Aporia and the Ode of the Learned Astronomer, amongst which the last is, I believe, the most superb, although this, I would say, finds its persuasive force more than the others in its purity of tone.



Your canzone differs from the majority of those of Francesco Petrarca in its looser rhetorical stance which is most notably evinced in your use of the chiave, that is, the rhyme `b' in the scheme `xaab/xccb//bdd/bee' connecting the fronte with the sirma. In no case does the chiave mark a logical division in any of the major strofe, and in every case this rhyme is aurally the weakest of the strofe, claudicated either by the adjungement or omission of the sibilant of the English plural declension, or else hewing to a feeble vowel-only rhyme. This formal innovation draws your poem a little farther away from the canzone petrarchesca, which it resembles in shape, and closer to the canzone a selva, such as Leopardi's irregular canzone A Silvia. The third pole of this ode-antenna (if you will) is of course the Pindaric, so that I see Prufrock as half-way betwen the Pindaric and Leopardic forms, while your poem I think is half between the Petrarchan and Leopardic. These are artificial but I hope illuminating distinctions. The more free, less dialectical pose of this poem, more given to praise than discovery, Homeric in its rage to catalogue, I found to be a pleasant and effective small step away from Petrarca to suit your own subject. Where it falters, perhaps, is in the occasional variability of tone, prolixity of ideation, monotony of praise. But these are as likely endemic in the matter, quibbles with the argument of the poem itself, more than with its making, or else peccati of my own taste or haste on in criticism, or even yours (mon cher ami) in composition. Let use take pleasure in reading it again.

Answer 2

I think anyone who has ever felt inspired to write poetry will be able to relate to "My Beauty". But how to comment on such a delicacy presents quite a challenge. This has been a true pleasure to read. Thank you.



May I add that there is no bar too high or too low? Wherever your inspiration takes you is just right, and it can take you further than you might ever imagine.

Answer 3

well, it was ONLY 365 sonnets for ONE woman, who would think that bar too high? Francesco Petrarca has just become a hero, i have always loved VULGAR poetry. thanks to you. i hope your Laura was happy with your... measly FIVE (!) sonnets. i really like the closing siesta... i mean sestet, couldn't get close enough to search it, left it so you would have an honest indication of my knowledge (lack there of) on the subject.

Answer 4

Where is the heart that penned these words? A grievous loss.