From Shipwreck to Port: Rvf 189 and the Making of the Canzoniere

Abstract

1. For Petrarch, the "peregrinus ubique" as he once famously styled himself (Ep. Metr. 3.19.16), travel represented a foundational trope, taking both the experience of life and the writing of it as interrelated journeys; and among the constellation of travel motifs that characterized his writings, shipwreck represented a pervasive, signature theme. In this note, I want to focus on the most important of Petrarch's many shipwrecks, Passa la nave mia colma di oblio, which stands out as one of the most recognizable and enduring of Petrarch's lyric moments. Indeed, it is especially preeminent among Petrarch's fragmenta for its afterlife outside of the book which originally contained it, that is, for its many translations and imitations down through the seven or so centuries since it was written, from Sir Thomas Wyatt's "My Galley, Charged with Forgetfulness" to John Berryman's "What was Ashore then? . . . cargoed with Forget," to speak only of the literary tradition in English. But the reception history of Rvf 189 will not be my subject here, except in the sense that our concern will be with the very earliest "fortuna" of the poem within the context of the history of the making [End Page 30] of Petrarch's book, the Canzoniere or the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf), and more specifically of the author's book itself, Vatican Latin manuscript 3195, during a crucial transitional phase of the "work in progress."1 For the journey towards posterity of Passa la nave mia began when it first entered the order of Petrarch's book, as the concluding poem at the end of the first part of the Chigi form of the Canzoniere (dated 1359-63), which survives in a manuscript written by Boccaccio, the second published form of the book according to Santagata (or the third form, according to the ordering of Wilkins' nine forms).2 The ending of the Chigi form of the book in its first part portrayed the poet shipwrecked, on the verge of catastrophic "ruina." Both the poem and Petrarch's prominent placement of it at the end of the first part corresponded to a moment of ideological and structural crisis in the history of the making of the Canzoniere, when the poet was as yet uncertain about how to resolve the dilemma he faced between competing conceptions of, on the one hand, Laura as a salvific force in his life, according to the model of the stilnovist lyric which had culminated in Dante's Beatrice, and on the other, of Laura as an object of sinful idolization and error according to the often quoted critique of Augustinus in the Secretum: "She has distanced your soul from celestial love and has deviated desire from the Creator to the creature."3 A distinct tendency toward the repudiation of Petrarch's desire for Laura had, in fact, informed the general orientation of the putative first published form of the Canzoniere, also known as the "Correggio" form (dated 1356-58), especially in the first part which is presumed to have ended with the penitential sestina 142, A la dolce ombra de le belle frondi.4 Nevertheless, as Santagata has demonstrated, this model [End Page 31] appeared to be already in crisis by the end of the second part of that form. Petrarch's continuation of the book in the Chigi form that followed shortly after the Correggio between 1359-63, further destabilized the penitential model that had informed the Correggio Canzoniere, since while reopening the book (and perhaps dividing it for the first time) Petrarch added poems to both parts but did not resolve the ideological and formal dilemma regarding Laura that had emerged.5 The abrupt ending of the Chigi form in both parts, but particularly in the first part characterized by the pessimistic and Cavalcantian shipwreck poem 189 ("Cavalcantian" in the sense that there is no penitential dimension but only despair...