Making Sense of Form

This article demonstrates how interpretation of the narrative arc of Francesco Petrarch’s Rvf governs readings of his double sestina, “Mia benigna fortuna e ’l viver lieto” (Rvf 332). Such readings have cast the poem as a simple self-negating lament, inducing scholars to skim over contradictions in the poem that, when examined closely, reveal radically different sentiments. The article examines how the form of the double sestina, as a trope, combines many of Petrarch’s key concerns, such as happiness, death, and poetic achievement and it concludes that the semantic import of the verse form contributes to a positive and a self-affirming evaluation of Petrarch’s own poetry

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