The Body of Italy
Petrarch imagines Italy as a beloved person who is suffering from wounds in lines 1-3: O, my own Italy, though words be uselessto heal the mortal woundsI see covering all your lovely body...On the...
The Deluge
Petrarch uses apostrophe in line 28 to address the onslaught of foreign fighters into the Italian countryside:O deluge that was gatheredfrom what strange wildernessto inundate all our sweet country...
The Swords of Strangers
We get our first clue to the specific problem in Petrarch's poem around line 20, when he throws this line out: "what are the swords of strangers doing here?" Now, Petrarch is not concerned about a...
The Perilous Pass
Petrarch hopes that the Italian nobility will soon have a change of heart and stop waging war on each other, but he's got to pull out all the stops to ensure that they'll hear what he says. So he c...
The Song as a Woman in Distress-Personification of Peace
This is strangest image we've seen in a while, to be honest. Petrarch uses his envoy or congedo (the last, farewell stanza) to turn his poem into a person. But personification of the poem itself is...