Poems from the Canzionere

Part I 1

19-20 Cf. Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

28

34

This sonnet was adapted by Chaucer as the lament of Troilus in his Troilus and Criseyde (400-21). It is the first poem of Petrarch to appear in English. 57

Part II 89

The Triumph of Eternity 153

156 time

Secretum, Book 3 159

166-167 my love could beat up your love

Think how you have distanced yourself from the love of God because of her, and fallen into all the woeful habits I know about but will not speak of, just in case I am overheard, if anyone should poke an ear into our conversation. 189

For what other purpose is there in all that unrelenting toil, all your late nights, and all the passionate energy you put into your studies? You will perhaps reply that you aim also to learn lessons for living. But really you learned all that is needed for life, and for death too, some time ago. You should have been trying to find a way to put those lessons into practice rather than continuing with this wearisome acquisition of knowledge. There are always more hidden corners, more unexplored obscurities, and research has no set limit. 191

But do you realize that death may snatch your weary pen from your hand before either work is complete, and that your immoderate pursuit of glory by two paths may mean that you reach your goal by neither? 192 #theonething

But what a perilous postponement, given the speed at which: time goes unpredictably by and your own life hurries away from you! I should like you to answer this question: If He who alone has set the limits of life and death were to determine today that you had just one whole year of life | left, without it being possible for you to have the shadow of doubt about it, how would you see yourself setting about spending this span of a year? 194

Someone who knows that he has one year to live has something certain, modest though it may be. But he who is subject to the ambiguous rule of death, under which all you mortal men spend your days, is not certain about a year, or a day, or a whole hour. With a year to live, even if six months are wasted, there is still the space of another six months. But if you waste today, who will you find to guarantee you a tomorrow? Cicero said that "it is certain we must die; what is uncertain is whether it is today," and that there ts no one so young that "it is known whether or not he will make it through to the 194 evening." 195 194-195

You brainless little man! So you think that at your nod the pleasures of heaven and earth will flow from both realms toward you with blissful results. Millions have had that delusion and countless souls have sunk to hell as a result. They thought they could keep one foot on earth and the other in heaven, but they were unsteady here, and could not move upward either. So they had a wretched fall. Suddenly the breath of life abandoned them either in their very prime, or else in the midst of planning for the future. Do you think that what has happened to so many cannot happen to you? Good grief, if you were, in the middle of your manifold projects, to suffer such a disaster—which God forbid!—what pain you would feel, what shame, and how late in the day you would be sorry! With your mind on so many things, you would have failed to bring any single one to fruition. 195

And then think about the death of the books in which your reputaions are enclosed, whether they are written by yourselves or by others. This death might seem to come much later, since a book has a longer life in human memory than a grave. But the fall into nothing is inevitable; books are subect to the countless forms of destructive action to which chance and nature subject everything else. Even if there were none of these, every book has its own aging, its own mortality to face. 197

Some things may seem more important to people at large, but there is really no form of reflection that is more beneficial or more fruitful than this. Thinking about other things may turn out to have no point, but the inevitable outcome of life is proof that reflections on oneself are always necessary. 202

Letters 206

1. To Giacomo Colonna (Familiares 2.9) 206

Simply this, that it is a rare book that-is free from risk, unless the reader is illuminated by the light of divine truth, which teaches what to follow and what to reject. If that light is the guide, there is total safety, and what might harm becomes more recognizable than Syrtes, Charybdis,7 and famous reefs of the deep. 208

7 The shoals of Syrtes (off North Africa) and the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis (in the straits of Messina) are canonical images of danger for classical writers. 208

With all my serious reading and reflection I expect to become a wise old man before I am old in years. 210 Cf. "Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise." —Shakespeare in King Lear

2. To Giacomo Colonna (Verse Letters 1.6) 213

218-219 Cf. Machiavelli’s letter to Vettori

3. To Dionigi da Borga San Sepolcro (Familiares 4.1) 220

Cf. Al-Attar & Dante

4. To Giovanni Boccaccio (Seniles 5.2) 227

Once they thought it a magnificent achievement to understand bits and pieces of great authors; today they try to shred their reputations. 233

5. To Posterity 237

I was a stern despiser of wealth, not because I did not want riches, but because I hated the efforts and worries that are their inseparable companions. 237

In these two places I learned what little grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric I could learn at that age, or what can be learned in schools. You can guess how little that means, dearest reader. 240