For I would have you know, Sancho, that all or nearly all of the knights errant of past times were great troubadours and great musicians, because these two skills, or to be more accurate, gifts, are essential to knights errant in love. (Don Quixote, I, 18)
In one of the most often imitated lyrics of the European Renaissance, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca depicts himself walking alone in the wilderness. "Solo e pensoso," he says," "I più deserti campi,/Vo mesurando/ a passi tardi e lenti." Or, as Robert Durling's translation has it, "Alone and filled with care, I go measuring the most deserted fields with steps delaying and slow." The key words in this passage are "mesurando" "measuring," and "passi," or steps. This last term, as commentators have often pointed out, suggests both the steps of the lover and the passi, or metric units of the poem itself. The measured gait of the suffering lover is co-extensive with the unfolding of the poem, step by step, syllable by syllable. And as the poem ends we learn that no matter where his steps lead him, Petrarch is accompanied by Love, which discourses with him, tormenting him and driving him on.
This image of the perfect unfolding of poetic line and poetic sense, of steps and syllables, will become a commonplace in Renaissance poetry, from Ronsard to Góngora. Petrarch's mobility is one of the features of his modernity. It marks him out, here as in his letters, as a reflective, self-regarding individual both driven by desire and able to comment, often ironically, on the forces that drive him. It is no accident that the most famous of these self-descriptions comes in a sonnet, as the sonnet is the form that, by its very structure, imposes on the self a movement of revision, of introspection, of turning and turning again.
Yet Petrarch's verse is rooted in literary history. In this case, he has read the Troubadour poets who wrote in Occitan in the 12th and 13th centuries. We see his proximity to the poetry of the troubadours most dramatically in the twenty-second poem of his Canzoniere. This is the first long poem in the collection, and it is a sestina. The sestina, we recall, is a strangely artificial poetic form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, with each line ending in one of six words. The six words each appear at a different place in the stanza as the form unfolds—ending the first line in the first verse, then the fifth line in the second verse, then the third, and so on, until each word has closed a different line and the poem has turned around itself. Petrarch's sestina tells of how the rhythms of the seasons come and go, day follows night, and night follows day. The natural world knows this. Only the poet, who is pining for his lady, cannot follow the normal rhythms of the day. He is an outlier, an unnatural self whose desire sets him at odds with the natural order of things. It is of course beautifully ironic that Petrarch's evocation of his erotic neural patterns should come in a sestina, the most rigid and cyclical of all poetic forms. His emotional torment stands against the regularity of the rigid poetic form that gives it voice.
Petrarch's poem is indebted to an earlier poem, the first sestina anyone knows about, by Arnaut Daniel, widely acknowledged to be the greatest of the Troubadours. Arnaut's sestina evokes his desire to enter into the room where his lady awaits him. Each time he tries to approach her, he cannot. The poem offers a set of situations in which his attempt to join the lady is derailed, as the form of the sestina suggests the constrained space of the room he cannot enter. Arnaut is tormented by what the first line of the poem calls "lo ferm voler q'el cor m'intra," "the strong desire that enters my heart." Petrarch recalls this language in his own sestina, where he speaks of his own "firm desire," "lo mio fermo desir," which, he says, comes from the stars. Petrarch thus echoes and translates Arnaut's language ("voler" becomes "desir") turning the drama of desire into a metaphysical drama about the place of the poet in the universe.
Arnaut's poem, like most Troubadour poems, is constructed of discrete single lines of meaning that are complete within themselves. Lines may consist of lists of adjectives, or descriptions of situations. Verbs and nouns go together within each poetic line: "I will take pleasure in my joy, in a garden or a chamber," ends the first stanza of Arnaut's poem, in a nice complete sentence.
Here are some more sample lines from Arnaut, in Fredrick Goldin's translation (slightly amended by me):
Let me be hers with my body, not my soul
let her hide me in her chamber
for it wounds my heart more than blows from a rod
and where she dwells her servant never enters.
[Del cors li fos, non de l'arma,
e cossentis m'a celat dinz sa cambra!
Que plus mi nafra-l cor que colps de verga
car lo sieus sers lai on ill es non entra]
As we can see, Arnaut gives us a set of periods that map easily onto the rhythmic form of the lines. Each one is balanced and each makes sense by itself.
Not so Petrarch. The key moment in his sestina comes in the fifth stanza, when he points out that he will soon die. Before he goes up to the stars in heaven, however, he expresses the hope that he will see pity for him in the face of his beloved:
Before I return to you, bright stars,
. . .
might I see pity in her, for in but one day
it could restore many years, and before the dawn
enrich me from the setting of the sun.
[Prima ch'i' torni a voi, lucenti stelle,
. . .
vedess' io in lei pietà, che 'n un sol giorno
può ristorar molt' anni, e 'nanzi l'alba
puommi arichir dal tramontar del sole.]
What is important are the enjambements or run-on lines that articulate the expression of desire. In contrast to what we see in Arnaut, Petrarch's line ending with the phrase "in but one day" cannot stand on its own. It is only completed by the first half of the following line, "it could restore many years." The same holds for the line ending in "before the dawn." The message of these phrases can only be conveyed across two poetic lines. The phrase begins in the middle of one line and ends in the middle of the next.
In contrast to the Troubadour practice of generating meaning in discrete, grammatically complete lines, Petrarch breaks the form.
He pushes against the rigid structure of the sestina, which marks out time as it unspools. Just as he tells us in the opening lines that he is outside of nature—unable to sleep when all the other creatures in the universe are resting—so here is he outside of the form of his own poem, twisting the rigid structure of the sestina in order to give voice to his despair and hope.
Petrarch's ability to push against the form of the sestina has something to do with the medium of the written text. Troubadour songs are sung. Petrarch's lyrics are meant to be read. Petrarch's virtuoso manipulation of Arnaut's form is primarily visual. To experience the poet's dislocation from the natural world we have to see where meaning stops at the end of a line, causing us to pause. To read, it would seem--or to write in order to be read--is no longer to be a Troubadour.