As a Latinist, I fell in love with Petrarch after discovering Sonnet 6, a reworking of Ovid’s Apollo and Daphne myth (Metamorphoses, I.452-567).  Petrarch’s sensitive Apollo describes his “insane desire /to chase the lady who has turned in flight… /(and) flies off ahead of my slow run for her.”   The “slow run” is a breathless allusion to Ovid’s Apollo’s comic speech, “Run more slowly, I beg you, and moderate your flight:  I myself will run more slowly.”

In a race of slow runners, Daphne and Laurel “win” the race. But Ovid’s Apollo and Petrarch’s Apollo’s paths diverge significantly. Ovid’s coarse Apollo, rather adorably obtuse at first, is angry when Daphne continues to run away from him. He is an outraged celebrity: doesn’t she know who he is? (She does.) On the other hand, Petrarch’s sensitive Apollo struggles to control his desire, but the reins and all control are snatched away from him: “I am left there in harness of his lordship/ as he against my will rides me to death.” And instead of Laura, he finds the laurel whose “bitter fruit… afflicts rather than comforts someone else’s wounds.”

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we also see the woman’s point of view. Daphne, a virginal follower of Diana, metamorphoses into a laurel tree after she begs her father, a river god, to change the form that has caused her distress. But Apollo still possesses her: he declares that she is his, and that the laurel will reward poets and winners of games. Still, Daphne comes out the winner, or that’s my interpretation. She and Laura both are inaccessible to men.

My edition of Petrarch, alas,  had no footnotes. But this sonnet fascinates me: a brilliant take on the famous myth.