SOURCE: Mariann Sanders Regan, "Petrarch," in Love Words: The Self and the Text in Medieval and Renaissance Poetry, Cornell, 1982, pp. 184-222.

In the following excerpt, Regan focuses on themes of love and self-examination in her reading of the Rime sparse.

et perché 'l mio martir non giunga a riva,
 mille volte il dì moro et mille nasco,
 tanto da la salute mia son lunge.1

We cannot intuit Lover infans in Petrarch's Canzoniere so easily or directly as we can in the lyrics by Dante and Arnaut Daniel. For through the metaphoric language of fusion, an illumined dyad sustains Daniel's poems, and a central presencing event rests at the heart of Dante's poetry; by contrast, in none of Petrarch's various works do Poet and Lover move harmoniously, in continual metaphors of fusion, toward some central arrheton, Rather, in these poems Poet and Lover join in more difficult, defensive verbal...