Petrarch is getting to me
I think this is the earliest in the year I've ever started applying school to...everything. I've been reading Petrarch's poems for Continental Lit, and apart from the obvious Dante comparisons (Laura's actually in heaven, beckoning him upwards! Come on, Beatrice did that ages ago. Find something new.), I've found something else of interest. To me.
One of the sonnets from the Canzoniere has eerie parallels with an episode from Harry Potter: namely, the retrieval of the sword in DH. It's sonnet 190:
A doe of purest white upon green grass
wearing two horns of gold appeared to me
between two streams beneath a laurel's shade
at sunrise in that season not yet ripe.
The sight of her was so sweetly austere
that I left all my work to follow her,
just like a miser who in search of treasure
with pleasure makes his effort bitterless.
"No one can touch me," around her lovely neck
was written out in diamonds and in topaz,
"It pleased my Caesar to create me free."
The sun by now had climbed the sky to midway,
my eyes were tired but not full from looking
when I fell into water, and she vanished.
Okay, yes, I know. The doe is Laura, whom he loves but who cruelly will not love him back. It has golden horns, like her golden hair; it is under a laurel tree, etc. I do see some similarities in attitude between Harry and Petrarch, although Harry isn't quite as whiny as Petrarch tends to be. Thankfully. But still...I wonder if JKR knows Petrarch, or if it's just me reading too much into things as usual. Probably the latter. What else am I going to do with my time? Reading Machiavelli is out of the question, because that would be productive. I should devote my life to making wild, random connections between various nerdy things.
Okay, the silly ramblings on fourteenth-century poetry are over.
One of the sonnets from the Canzoniere has eerie parallels with an episode from Harry Potter: namely, the retrieval of the sword in DH. It's sonnet 190:
A doe of purest white upon green grass
wearing two horns of gold appeared to me
between two streams beneath a laurel's shade
at sunrise in that season not yet ripe.
The sight of her was so sweetly austere
that I left all my work to follow her,
just like a miser who in search of treasure
with pleasure makes his effort bitterless.
"No one can touch me," around her lovely neck
was written out in diamonds and in topaz,
"It pleased my Caesar to create me free."
The sun by now had climbed the sky to midway,
my eyes were tired but not full from looking
when I fell into water, and she vanished.
Okay, yes, I know. The doe is Laura, whom he loves but who cruelly will not love him back. It has golden horns, like her golden hair; it is under a laurel tree, etc. I do see some similarities in attitude between Harry and Petrarch, although Harry isn't quite as whiny as Petrarch tends to be. Thankfully. But still...I wonder if JKR knows Petrarch, or if it's just me reading too much into things as usual. Probably the latter. What else am I going to do with my time? Reading Machiavelli is out of the question, because that would be productive. I should devote my life to making wild, random connections between various nerdy things.
Okay, the silly ramblings on fourteenth-century poetry are over.