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            From that moment on, the nature of love is forever confused.  Petrarch admires Laura’s spiritual nature.  How could that admiration become mixed with lust for her, a married Christian woman?  How could love be lust, or lust love?  How could love, which comes from God, be given in the perverse, painfully destructive form of unrequited obsession?
            By poem 6 the duality is seen to be within Petrarch himself.  He is not only the two aspects, he is the actual self the two aspects are ripping apart.  Love and lust fight against themselves until Petrarch is dragged to death’s door. Though Petrarch takes responsibility for his sin of lust, he recognizes that its power over him is beyond his own control. 
            In poem 10 his bitterness is heightened because even the divine heights reached by poetry weigh down his heart with thoughts of love.  In classic midrash style, he challenges God by claiming that “goodness of this scale [exemplified in poetry] / is what you interrupt and undermine, / my Lord, by keeping us apart.”  It is unfair that what is counted against him as sinful lust for Laura could in another context become the sacred communion of wedded love. 
            There are moments, he tells us in the sestina 239, when Laura inspires “the sweetest musings” in him.  Not only does she seem to be the God-like power behind creation, the power of her presence in his life is the inspiration of his poetry.  If only his poetic outpourings could be tempered in such a way that his words would move her.  But that will never be.  Poetry becomes absurd, because the more and better he writes, the less able he is to communicate his feelings to her.  Poetry may be inspired by love, but love is not fired by poetry. 
            She remains unmoved, yet “she cannot oppose a higher power.”  “Both men and gods are vanquished by the power / of Love, as seen in prose and poetry.”  On the one hand, he is being tested — by God, via her — by the sensations and creation she has inspired.  On the other, not even God can pressure her to free his life from anguish, or from the tainted, yet enlightened, soul she has to some extent created in him.  Ironically, given all the love poetry written for and inspired by her, Laura is not someone sensitive to the wooing of poetry, or of Love’s power.
            Year after year Petrarch longs for what he longs to be free of, fleeing the lust within himself that pursues Laura — which really, he realizes, pursues him.
            “Sadly, I stay, but long to go, / and long for longing that has passed, / and fail at partial resolutions. / New tears for old desires show / I am unchanged; I have held fast / despite a thousand revolutions.”
            Even in those moments when he seems released from the evil of lust, he endures the greater pain of shame.  He knows that his idolatry — for that is what his “love” has become — keeps him from the spiritual level Laura has reached and that he claims (unjustly, he knows) she prevents him from reaching.
            In the collection’s final poems, Petrarch laments that even dead his lady reigns and “witnesses her life in her own way.”  At every hour she seems to send a messenger to him, yet instead of receiving resolution and peace, his visitations bring him yet more confusion and restlessness.
           Tremendous poetic tension builds up around paradox, irony, duality — an aesthetic insight not lost on Juster, or on subsequent poets.  How many great Renaissance and Metaphysical poems echoed these realizations of Petrarch’s poem 178:
           “Love spurns at the same time it holds the rein, / assures and terrorizes, chills and burns, / embraces and disdains, attracts and spurns, / and then maintains my hopefulness and pain; / he makes my weary heart both wax and wane / so my lost longing takes misguided turns / and sneers at joys for which it dearly yearns / as these bizarre delusions crowd my brain.”  He is fully aware of, yet baffled by, the intersection where his heart “would run to be content; / and then, as if repelled by greater powers, / it turns away, and after fierce objection, / gives its slow death and mine its forced consent.”
            This is a good example of a passage in which sound enhances meaning.  The internal rhymes “disdains” and “maintains” bearing down so close to “pain” and “wane” and then echoed in “brain” give the voice the quality of crying out obsessively, painfully.  Juxtaposing sounds that flame and crackle with smooth, liquid sounds tangibly registers the weave of opposites in which he is tangled and forces us to feel the torque from fire erupting to its being doused over and over again. The overall music becomes an extended onomatopoeia of agonized confusion.
            Paradox is often part of the very structure of poetry, as in the turn between the octave and sestet of a classic Petrarchan sonnet.  In these poems there are also paradoxical “turns” in images, such as the image of the deer used in poems 23 and 190.
            Poem 23 alludes to the myth of Actaeon, who while hunting, unintentionally saw Diana naked in her cave.  She splashed water in his face, and he was changed into a stag that was pursued and eventually torn to pieces by his own dogs.  In Petrarch’s version, his innocence is immediately turned to lust, which eventually pursues him.  “While hunting on my usual terrain, / I followed my desire so far one day / that the wild one, vicious and ravishing, / emerged naked from a spring / as the sun burned its strongest.  I, who may / be unappeased when other sights appear, / remained to watch, so she was mortified, / and then for spite or to deter a chase, / she slapped a little water in my face. / I’ll tell the truth, though it may seem I’ve lied, / for then I felt my image turn unclear / and quickly change into a lonely deer / who drifts from wood to wood, and now I flee / because my frothing dogs have turned on me.”
            His change was from self-possessed, virtuous (yet proud) Christian to a mere animal ravished by instinctual forces beyond his control, both without and within himself.