CERTALDO
It is possible that his friends in Florence heard of his miseries and his poverty—for he was very poor, and it was really on his behalf the Cathedra Dantesca was founded. However that may be, it might have seemed impossible that one in his case could have accepted it, yet in spite of his weakness he left Certaldo and went to Florence, where, as we have seen, in accordance with the decree of the Signoria he began to lecture in October. That he broke down is not surprising; it is only wonderful that he got as far as he did. But that brief burst of energy was his last; in the winter of 1373 he returned to Certaldo really to die.
From that moment all his melancholy seems to have returned to him with fourfold strength: he who had taken his fill of life, now could no more look happily on the sky, he was a dying man and he knew it. He groped about far from Petrarch looking for some appalling certainty. He seems to have thought he could find it in the monastic life, and his solitude must have been not less profound. Death and thoughts about death haunted him, as they are wont to do imaginative people. It must have been in some such darkness as that which then fell upon him that he wrote more than one of the sonnets in which he seems to have sought in verse the power to realise what it was that was about to befall him.
"Dura cosa è ed orribile assai
La morte ad aspettare e paurosa,
Ma così certa ed infallibil cosa
Nè fu, nè è, nè credo sarà mai;
E 'l corso della vita è breve c' hai,
E volger non si può nè dargli posa;
Nè qui si vede cosa sì gioiosa