Petrarch got up every morning at midnight

“I regard sleep as a kind of death, my bed as a tomb.”

Welcome to the 138th issue of Subtle Maneuvers. It’s National Poetry Month! Browse my previous poet-focused posts here.

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Petrarch (1304–1374)

Petrarch, circa 1345 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

As a habitual if reluctant morning person—I don’t really like waking up early, but I do it because it’s the only time I can focus properly, alas—I’m always eager to read about other early risers and thereby reinforce my sense that I’m doing something right by dragging myself out of bed at 5:30 a.m. every weekday and not, you know, just being a rigid, routine-obsessed weirdo (ha ha?).

Until recently, the earliest-rising writer I’d read about was Octavia Butler, the great science-fiction author, who, when she was working a series of “horrible little jobs” to pay the bills, would get up as early 2:00 a.m. to write in the hours before she had to go to work. But then, last week, I was researching the 14th-century Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca—known to English speakers as Petrarch—and I ran across this passage from a letter dated February 22, 1353:

I am well and happy, and I refuse those concerns that make so many unhappy. Here is the routine of my life: I rise at midnight; I go outdoors with the first light; and whether in the fields or in the house I am busy thinking, reading, writing. As much as I can I fend off sleep from my eyes, sloth from my body, distractions from my spirits, torpor from my actions.

He would rise at . . . midnight? This seems a little hard to believe, but Petrarch repeats the claim in another letter, from 1357, writing: “Sleep and I part company at midnight; and if sometimes the shorter night or some late vigils prolong my repose, still never does the dawn find me abed.” OK, so sometimes he would sleep in until dawn—but not because he enjoyed it! “I regard sleep as a kind of death,” he wrote, “my bed as a tomb.”

Petrarch in his study, from a fresco painted shortly after his death in 1374, via Public Domain Review

The writing life!

Once he was out of bed, Petrarch went straight to work—or, as he put it, “when I feel that Nature’s bonds are relaxed, I cast them off immediately and repair to my adjoining library as to a castle keep.” And as the day went on, he wasted as little time as possible on such frivolous activities as eating and personal grooming. In yet another letter describing his ascetic lifestyle—this one from 1359—Petrarch wrote that

in the matter of time-saving, I follow Augustus, and while I am being shaved or having my hair cut I commonly read or write or listen to a reader or dictate to a scribe. And it has been my habit to do the same while riding or dining. (I don’t remember reading this about Augustus or anyone else.) You may be surprised to learn that sitting my horse I have often finished a poem at the same time as my journey.

What are we to make of this guy? I’m mostly charmed by his funny brand of poet-scholar humblebragging—Petrarch really needs his correspondents to understand, like, man, I am working hard over here. In another letter, he even relates an anecdote involving a friend who tried to force him to stop working for ten days. This friend locked up all of Petrarch’s books and writing materials, then left with the key, thinking this would force the poet to take a proper rest. How did Petrarch like it?

I felt as if I were bound hand and foot. That [first] day passed wearily, seeming as long as a year. The next day I had a headache from morning till night. The third day dawned and I began to feel the first signs of fever, when my friend returned, and seeing my plight gave me back the keys. I quickly recovered, and perceiving that I lived on work, as he expressed it, he never repeated his request.

Reading the above, you may not be surprised to learn that Petrarch was a lifelong bachelor. “It takes great strength of body and mind to support both scholarship and a wife,” he observed in another letter.

If I’m making Petrarch sound like sort of a peevish misanthrope—well, that does seem to be the trajectory of his personality in his later years. But his letters also contain many beautiful odes to friendship as well as some bracing observations about the art of writing. I particularly love the following line, from a 1363 letter to a fellow writer, about the need to ignore one’s critics—or, even better, to keep them in mind as you write, and let their image shape your prose. “Let us write then,” Petrarch advises his friend, “but in such a way that any who may attempt to gnaw at our work will find it hard, solid, glowing, bristling.”

Petrarch portrait by Altichiero da Verona, via Public Domain Review

All Petrarch quotes above from Morris Bishop’s Letters from Petrarch (Indiana University Press, 1966), except the quote about Petrarch taking a forced rest, which I found here.

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POETS ON HORSEBACK

Petrarch was not the only poet to compose on horseback. A friend of the Romantic poet Lord Byron once described his afternoon routine as follows: “At three he mounted his horse and sauntered along the road—and generally the same road,—if alone, racking his brains for fitting matter and rhymes for the coming poem.” Read more below:

Byron composed on horseback, Shelley gnawed a hunch of dry bread

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ME IN MASSACHUSETTS

Next week, I’m going to be in Hardwick, Massachusetts, for a school visit, and on the evening of Friday, April 26, I’ll be giving a public reading at the Center at Eagle Hill. If you’re in the area, please come by and say hello! The event starts at 7:00 p.m.; it’s free and open to all. RSVP here.

And if anyone reading this would like to discuss future speaking engagements, please drop me a line; I’d be delighted to have more opportunities to talk about writers’ and artists’ weird habits and what we can learn from them, if anything. (I think we can learn some things!)

Me discussing writers’ routines / Petrarch pictured in an Andrea del Castagno fresco at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

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