ABSTRACT
Petrarch consequently uses elements of Dante's Edenic recognition scene in order to construct a completely new semantics of desire. Harshness, though inevitable for Petrarch in this poem, is thus not so much cultivated, as imposed on him by the destitution of desire, something which leads him simultaneously to revisit the legacy of Dante petroso. Writing is the product of the death of the voice, which everywhere 'cries out' in material things and not words. While it is true that there appears to be a breakthrough at the end of the fourth stanza, when the subject turns to the landscape to speak for him, it is not so much the retrieval of an articulate speech as that of a body language of sighs that the landscape amplifies. Petrarch's poem is replete with metaphors that suggest that was it in play is a mind that thinks it is a body.
