Consider Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella as a Petrarchan-sonnet. Is it
a poem about originality or about love? (10marks)
Answer: All Elizabethan sonneteers other than Donne used the newly found and yet
widely practised genre of the sonnet for the expression of their love. Petrarch’s love
for Laura, ‘the kin but constant and pure-attachment’, became the paradigmatic
pattern for the English triumvirate ----- Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare------
though Sidney was apparently the most Petrarchan of them all. Yet, in spite of
Sidney’s utilization of the Petrarchan theme of the idealization of the unreachable
beloved, Sidney’s was also a revolt against and a replacement of a Petrarchan
conventions by his own innovations. Sidney was aware that mere imitation, pure
plagiarism, could only lead to frigidity of response: “... If I were a Mistress, would
never persuade me they were in love, so coldly they apply fiery speeches.” (Defence
of Poetry). Consequently, Astrophel and Stella is a sonnet-sequence which is as
much about poetry, and originality in poetry, as about love.
The first quatrain of the octave which is sworn of all imagery, is the ‘argument’ far it
unambiguously states the theme of the sonnet-sequence. The ostensible and actual
purpose of the sonnets is to express the poet’s love Stella, a pseudonym for
Penelope Devereux, an unfulfilled and possible unrequited love which was
transmuted into metafiction. He hoped that “she, dear she,” would be pleased by “his
pain,” and the latter representing both the literal misery of unrewarded love and the
metaphorical pain involved in every act of creation. He would paint the “blackest face
of woe,” which he has elsewhere termed “my hale” (Sonnet No. 2), in order to
motivate her to read further about his distress, thereby leading to knowledge of his
agonizing love, to pity for the lover, and gradually to love for the sufferer, all these
occurring in seriatim succession.
If the first quatrain states the objective, the second quatrain in the octave unravels
the means. He feels that entertaining her wits with poetry ------- something which
Eliot called “superior entertainment “------- would be beyond his own ability.
Therefore, he would require the intervention of poets, ancient and modern. He
therefore rifled through the texts of other love-poets in search of “invention”, thereby
achieving its veritable opposite, imitation. He felt that his was a “sun-burnt brain”
which required nourishment from without, like the parched vegetation which required
a nourishing shower from the rain-laden clouds. The striking phrase, “sun-burnt
brain” is an accepted Elizabethan figure for poetic imitation, and the metaphor is
drawn free Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric in which a poet has been parched by
walking too long in the sun of the ancients.
The sestet marks a reversal in theme. While the octave proposes imitation, the
sestet opposes it by pointing out that other poets must appear to be ‘strangers’, for
no two lovers are exactly alike, and every love must find its individual idiom. The
clichéd advise of treading the beaten path, while appropriate to prose, is wholly
inappropriate to poetry, for poetry is the true voice of feeling. He notices that others
'feet' ---- the paronomasia suggesting both the theme and the metrical pattern ------
would lead him to express the themes of others rather than those of his own.
Invention is "Nature's child", a product of spontaneity and study can only be the
repressive step-mother from whose blows the sensitive child, poetry, invariably flees.
Continuing with the striking image of the poet has an intellectual--- emotional creator
with the birth-pangs of the mother, Sidney declares that he failed to give birth to the
poem as long as he sought to imitate others. It is only the epiphany of the divine
which can guide him to individual mode:
a poem about originality or about love? (10marks)
Answer: All Elizabethan sonneteers other than Donne used the newly found and yet
widely practised genre of the sonnet for the expression of their love. Petrarch’s love
for Laura, ‘the kin but constant and pure-attachment’, became the paradigmatic
pattern for the English triumvirate ----- Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare------
though Sidney was apparently the most Petrarchan of them all. Yet, in spite of
Sidney’s utilization of the Petrarchan theme of the idealization of the unreachable
beloved, Sidney’s was also a revolt against and a replacement of a Petrarchan
conventions by his own innovations. Sidney was aware that mere imitation, pure
plagiarism, could only lead to frigidity of response: “... If I were a Mistress, would
never persuade me they were in love, so coldly they apply fiery speeches.” (Defence
of Poetry). Consequently, Astrophel and Stella is a sonnet-sequence which is as
much about poetry, and originality in poetry, as about love.
The first quatrain of the octave which is sworn of all imagery, is the ‘argument’ far it
unambiguously states the theme of the sonnet-sequence. The ostensible and actual
purpose of the sonnets is to express the poet’s love Stella, a pseudonym for
Penelope Devereux, an unfulfilled and possible unrequited love which was
transmuted into metafiction. He hoped that “she, dear she,” would be pleased by “his
pain,” and the latter representing both the literal misery of unrewarded love and the
metaphorical pain involved in every act of creation. He would paint the “blackest face
of woe,” which he has elsewhere termed “my hale” (Sonnet No. 2), in order to
motivate her to read further about his distress, thereby leading to knowledge of his
agonizing love, to pity for the lover, and gradually to love for the sufferer, all these
occurring in seriatim succession.
If the first quatrain states the objective, the second quatrain in the octave unravels
the means. He feels that entertaining her wits with poetry ------- something which
Eliot called “superior entertainment “------- would be beyond his own ability.
Therefore, he would require the intervention of poets, ancient and modern. He
therefore rifled through the texts of other love-poets in search of “invention”, thereby
achieving its veritable opposite, imitation. He felt that his was a “sun-burnt brain”
which required nourishment from without, like the parched vegetation which required
a nourishing shower from the rain-laden clouds. The striking phrase, “sun-burnt
brain” is an accepted Elizabethan figure for poetic imitation, and the metaphor is
drawn free Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric in which a poet has been parched by
walking too long in the sun of the ancients.
The sestet marks a reversal in theme. While the octave proposes imitation, the
sestet opposes it by pointing out that other poets must appear to be ‘strangers’, for
no two lovers are exactly alike, and every love must find its individual idiom. The
clichéd advise of treading the beaten path, while appropriate to prose, is wholly
inappropriate to poetry, for poetry is the true voice of feeling. He notices that others
'feet' ---- the paronomasia suggesting both the theme and the metrical pattern ------
would lead him to express the themes of others rather than those of his own.
Invention is "Nature's child", a product of spontaneity and study can only be the
repressive step-mother from whose blows the sensitive child, poetry, invariably flees.
Continuing with the striking image of the poet has an intellectual--- emotional creator
with the birth-pangs of the mother, Sidney declares that he failed to give birth to the
poem as long as he sought to imitate others. It is only the epiphany of the divine
which can guide him to individual mode:
