SOURCE: Robert M. Durling, in an introduction to Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 1-33.

In the essay below, Durling provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of the Rime sparse.

Ser Petracco (or, as he sometimes spelled it, Petrarcha) of Florence was exiled from his native city in 1301, at the same time as his friend Dante Alighieri; but his later life was much more prosperous than Dante's. Along with many other Italians he eventually moved to Avignon, the new seat of the papacy, where he became one of the most successful members of the legal profession, thanks partly to the patronage of powerful Italian clergymen. His eldest son, Francesco, who had been born in Arezzo on July 20, 1304, was eight when the family moved to Provence; with his mother and brother Francesco lived...