This installment of Sousarion Reacts is different. Rather than commentary, it is a poem: a five-part sonnet written in dialogue with Petrarch and culminating in his Sonnet 336. It is not translation, nor mere imitation, but an homage: a reimagining of Petrarch’s lifelong struggle with longing and inevitability.
Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), the poet-scholar later called the “father of humanism,” spent his life in the shadow of one woman: Laura. Whether real or imagined, married or unobtainable, she became the axis of his Canzoniere — a sequence of over 300 poems where devotion and desire wrestle with faith and despair. His verses helped shape what we call lyric poetry itself: love transfigured into song, suffering made immortal. What follows is my Sonnet Crown for Petrarch, a contemporary echo of his voice, addressed to Laura, and through her, to the condition of all longing.
My god, my god, forsaken how I love her so.
Love burns within, devouring all of me.
I cannot help it; I have lost all mastery.
Held fast, completely at her mercy,
And painfully, for she has shown me none.
A most chaste soul is she, undefiled, pure and true,
While I, a poet, sorrowful fool, sing of self-imprisonment, of freedom slain.
Can it be helped that I’ve resigned myself away?
That day the scales fell from my eyes:
At highest noon, the church bells chimed; ‘twas then I turned, beheld her.
Her radiant light unmade me whole
And set my soul to flame.
Oh, the fires of life! Her heat, no soothing for my burns.
Her eyes — her eyes!
Her glance pierced through, seared my soul entire.
For her, I shall smolder for all eternity.
Blessed am I in suffering, the gift she gave.
I keep my vigil in the void; her absence gnaws me bare.
My flesh consumed in sorrow’s ravishing flames,
As I hunger for bread and thirst for love.
Yet to my goddess, in famine, I remain steadfast.
O Laura, Laura — demonic, pure, angelic flame!
What need has she of dust and ash as I?
She is divine; I am but need itself.
So I wander the valleys of shadow, the allées of Vaucluse,
Bereft of her light, I find no rest.
Rudderless without her, in my sea of lonesomeness.
Yea, though the waters may bear me, no shore yields peace.
Yea, though I rise on eagles’ wings toward heaven, I am spurned.
She is my sun — blazing, terrible, divine.
I soar once more but fall, Icarus-bound.
A smoldering ruin, a sacrifice of unfulfillable longing.
I know not what I truly am to do,
Without a light or pathway to advance,
Defeated even ’fore she caught my glance,
There seems no way for me to see life through.
No miracle nor penance shall ensue,
My heart bleeds from the strike of Cupid’s lance,
As shadows swallow me in their expanse,
No hope remains to heal my wounds anew.
If I am cursed to love without requite,
Then this I must accept; there is no choice:
I’ll live in solitude, steadfast in love.
I shall resign myself, become Love’s knight;
My work shall grow and through it I’ll rejoice,
Until in death we reunite above.
Engraving from the New York Public Library Collection
This is the path: my fate revealed, my lot made clear.
It will be bitter, and remain so to the end.
My god, my god — how fierce her absence burns.
Yet I must keep my strength, preserve my faith,
Not in myself, but in the labor of my hands.
To beauty I bend my will, as fate allows.
I bare the record of my life:
My triumphs and defeats, my rivalries and reveries,
Dreams so vivid, visions of beauty unconsumed,
Ah! — my soul is nourished when my goddess graces me in sleep.
I have not been forsaken; nor will I despair, though my grief compels—
For thus it has been and so it shall remain.
The horizon holds its distance; the sun sinks lower every day.
My breath grows short, the body weakens — yet the spirit stands steadfast
…until I hear that she has passed…
My god, my god — would that I had clasped Death first!
Yet in some sense I have met him, tasted of the Styx:
My heart is sealed, all meaning in my life has breathed its last.
I hasten now unto my end, that I may join with Laura.
No reason binds me any more to Earth.
Life’s luster cleft, my poems have spread their wings — and I am proud.
What more remains? I have unveiled my soul, my secrets sung aloud.
In memory I abide, in hope of the world to come:
To reunite with her in paradise — and there at least find peace.
Sonetto 336 di Petrarca
Tornami a mente (anzi v’è dentrol quella
Ch’indi per Lete esser non po sbandita)
Qual io la vidi in su l’età fiorita
Tutta accesa de’raggi di sua stella;
Si nel mio primo occorso onesta et bella
veggiola in sè raccolta er sì Romita,
ch’ i’ grido: “Ell’ èben dessa, ancor è in vita!”
e ‘n don le cheggio sua dolce favela.
Talor risponde et talor non fa motto;
i’ comme uom ch’ erra et poi più dritto Estima
dico a la mente mia: “Tu se’ ‘ngannata.
“Sui che ‘n mille trecento quarantotto,
il di sesto d’aprile, in l’ora prima
del corpo uscio quell’ anima beata.
Here’s a translation of this sonnet:
She comes to mind (indeed she dwells within),
Whom Lethe’s stream can never drive away:
I saw her in her youth’s most radiant day,
All lit with starlight burning bright therein.
So in that first encounter, pure, serene,
She showed herself withdrawn, in holy stay;
I cried aloud: “’Tis she! She lives today!”
And begged her speak to me with voice unseen.
At times she answers, other times is still;
And I, like one astray who finds the way,
Say to my soul: “Deceived, thou art misled.
It was in thirteen hundred forty-eight,
at April’s dawn, the sixth day,
That blessed soul departed from her bed.”
Thus ends this Sonnet Crown for Petrarch,
with his own final word —
secrets sung aloud across the centuries.
The longing in Sonnet Crown for Petrarch is so beautifully composed, it conveys the bittersweet beauty of deep, unfulfilled yearning. The poetic form and the lyrical language elevated the emotion of longing beyond simple sadness or desire.