In this paper we propose reading three sonnets by Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch in terms of the different temporalities they enact and the modalities of desire they represent: ‘Chi e questa che vèn ch’ogn’om la mira’ [Who is she who comes, that everyone admires her]; ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’ [My lady shows such grace and dignity] and ‘Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi’ [Her golden hair was loosed to the breeze]. We aim to show first how temporality is conveyed by each text and then the kind of desire it brings into play. In a sense, temporality is what explains the different kinds of desire we find expressed in each sonnet and especially the poet's relationship to loss or absence, and presence.

All three texts engage with the notion of epiphany, understood as an event in time that is focused on an experience of instantaneity and implies a showing forth. In this sense, epiphany (etymologically derived from the Greek, ἐπιϕάνϵια, meaning ‘manifestation’) is a kind of presencing: a way both to experience presence in the present and to make it visible. In the sonnets by Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch, the feeling of instantaneity is present in each but experienced (in Petrarch's poem, especially, we should say created) in different ways. The process of manifestation is carried, in each poem, by the poets’ use of the verb mostrare or parere (to show/appear) and we regard epiphany, in its most perfect form, as an instantaneous unfolding that contains the paradox of a kind of static movement or moving stasis, which correlates to a perfect fulfilment (not cessation) of desire.

The sonnets’ relationship with temporality can best be figured by thinking of Cavalcanti's poem as suggesting a notion of a ‘not yet’ which is ‘never there’, Dante's poem as embodying an experience of the ‘now’, and Petrarch's time as an epiphany in the past that succeeds in incorporating what came before and reenergizes it from the perspective of the ‘post’. In terms of desire and knowing (or, in Petrarch's case, not wanting to know) these forms of temporality correspond, in John L. Austin's terms, to a sense of misfire in Cavalcanti and felicity in Dante; while for Petrarch we can speak of perseverance.