In the Library
The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch
Petrarch, 1341
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 8.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 8
- Length
- Length 121k words
£1.99
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I fynde no peace and all my warre is done,
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About the book
A poet sees a young woman in a church in Avignon on Good Friday in 1327, and for the next forty years he writes about that single moment of recognition. Francesco Petrarca worked at his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta across his entire adult life, completing the collection that posterity calls the Canzoniere around 1341 and revising it until his death in 1374. The 366 poems, almost all sonnets, divide into Laura's life and Laura's death, charting a love whose object barely speaks and whose absence is more present than her presence ever was. Petrarch invented, in the sequence's pacing and self-scrutiny, the form every European love poet would inherit. Every sonnet written since has been a footnote to her smile.