A Poetic Response: Petrarch's Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta

One does not have to read Petrarch’s Canzoniere for long before realizing that the metaphors found in it are primarily those of the lyric tradition. Love as burning fire, an unresponsive heart as ice, Madonna or love as the poet’s lord, the poet on the sea of love threatened with shipwreck by the storms he encounters: all metaphors that fill the pages of the Canzoniere and that we have seen many times before. If we are looking for metaphors that involve a dramatic juxtaposition of unrelated objects or concepts, we are unlikely to find them in Petrarch. The semantic-field approach to literary metaphor is even less illuminating for Petrarch than it was for Dante, who at least covered an exceptionally wide range of different fields.