Petrarch's Lyric Poems by Francesco Petrarca

For him, Petrarch’s unrequited love for Laura was about directing his soul, “From her to you comes loving thought that leads, as long as you pursue, to highest good.” That God revealed Laura to him on Good Friday was everything. Petrarch was not selfishly obsessive, but a man instead who knew love in a different way. They likely never met or spoke from that moment, but Petrarch wrote hundreds of sonnets about her and to her. It was Laura de Sade, who was already wed or soon to be by most accounts. The story he tells in Sonnet 3 is that as he was at service on Good Friday in Avignon, a day of “universal woe,” a light from the cathedral window shone on a woman rows in front of him.

Though he did not invent the sonnet, the personal and spiritual nature of his verse is intensely compelling. Petrarch pursued his minor orders as a cleric and began to write, and this is where the sonnet as a popular form was born. Some biographers say that his father died before he could quit others that he was simply dissatisfied with the untruthfulness of law practice. Any passerby would know the value of that fire, and disheartened, within a few months Petrarch quit law school and promptly announced he was going to be a writer and poet and take his ecclesiastical orders. Meanwhile, his father set fire to the small stash in the middle of the street. His personal library held copies of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as Virgil’s Aeneid, all of which he loved dearly. If the story is indeed true, Petrarch likely spent a month’s allowance on one book alone.

Before the printing press, many books were hand-copied and sewn together at great cost. Throwing around books, though, was no light matter at this time. Enraged at the number of books Petrarch had purchased with his allowance, he promptly threw them out of the window and into the street below.

One such afternoon, Petrarch was quietly reading a book in his rented room when his father suddenly arrived. Legend tells that since his father was supplying rent and allowance to Petrarch, he often made surprise visits at university.

By age sixteen, Petrarch dutifully followed in his father’s footsteps and studied law first at Montpelier then at Bologna. Once in France, Petrarch’s father practiced law successfully, and the family prospered, so much so that he arranged the best education money could buy at the time-private tutors. He too was exiled from Italy with his family due to civil unrest. Like his predecessor Dante, Petrarch was a devout Catholic. It all began with Francesco Petrarch in 1304. When they were first written in the fourteenth century, however, their intent was much different. When we think of love sonnets, most of us think of the sappy ooze of lyricists or the sometimes flavorless mush in cheap greeting cards. Francesco Petrarch and Laura de Sade likely never met or spoke, but Petrarch wrote hundreds of sonnets about her and to her.

Petrarch's Lyric Poems by Francesco Petrarca