Petrarch, Ronsard, and the Seven Year Itch

Abstract

Petrarch, Ronsard, and the Seven Year Itch David Quint (bio) The thirtieth poem of Petrarch's Canzoniere, "Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro," is the first sestina and also the first anniversary poem of the lyric sequence. The seventh year has arrived, Petrarch declares, since he first met and fell in love with Laura on Good Friday, April 6, 1327: "che s'al contar non erro, oggi à sett'anni / che sospirando vo di riva in riva" (RVF 30.28-29).1 Robert Durling demonstrated the relationship of the liturgy and imagery of Good Friday to the poem, that the laurel tree celebrated in the poem is an idolatrous substitute for the Cross. He also noted that Petrarch celebrates this seventh anniversary because it had brought him in 1334 to the age of thirty, the age traditionally ascribed to Christ at the time of the Passion—and this number corresponds to the number of the poem in the Canzoniere.2 John Freccero gave the same sestina pride of place in his landmark essay, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," which describes, in the terms of Augustine, the drive in Petrarch's poetry to make self-referential idols both of the lady it praises and of its own words: "to deprive signs of their referentiality and to treat a poetic statement as autonomous, an end in itself, is the definition of idolatry."3 [End Page S137] I want to argue that a second Biblical text and chain of symbolism informs the poem and its playing of the seventh year aniversary of Petrarch's love against the six times six pattern of the sestina form itself. This reading is retrospectively authorized by the poetry of Ronsard, one of Petrarch's strongest readers. Ronsard's different treatment of the same motif helps us, moreover, to distinguish a later Petrarchism from Petrarch's own model: in this later, Renaissance poetry, to put the matter simply, love can come to an end. This difference raises the larger poetic issue: the relationship of the lyric moment to ongoing time. 1. Petrarch In Exod. 21 and again in Deut. 15, Mosaic law spells out the obligations of Hebrew masters to slaves of their own people. The slave will serve for six years, but in the seventh the master will set him free with no charge. However, the slave, who may by now be married and have children whom he is unwilling to leave, can choose to remain perpetually in servitude to his master, who shall offer him to God, lead him to a door post, and pierce his ear: Si emeris servum hebraeum, sex annis serviet tibi; in septimo egredietur liber gratis. . . Quod si dixerit servus: Diligo dominum meum et uxorem ac liberos, non egrediar liber, offeret eum dominus diis, et applicabitur ad ostium et postes, perforabitque aurem eius subula, et erit ei servus in saeculum. (Exod. 21.2.5)4 The passage produced opposing interpretations among the Church fathers. Perhaps influenced by the analogy that the Deuteronomy version draws to the divine deliverancee of the Hebrews from Egyptian servitude (15.15), Hrabanus Maurus read it anagogically: "This is said not of the present era, but of the future; for serving in the six ages of this era, we will be freed on the seventh day of the eternal sabbath, unless we do not wish to be free while we serve in this age of sin. If however we do not wish it, our ear will be pierced as the mark of our disobedience, and with our wife and our children whom we preferred to freedom, that is, with the flesh and its works, we will be slaves to [End Page S138] sin perpetually for all eternity."5 For Hrabanus, the six years of slavery represent human existence in this world, beneath the yoke of the flesh and of sin, as opposed to a seventh year of spiritual deliverance. But Hrabanus acknowledges the different, contrasting understanding of the passage advanced by Gregory the Great, who reads in bono the master's offering his slave to God—"offeret eum dominus diis." Gregory interprets the six years of servitude as the active life versus the contemplative life...