Astrophil and Stella 1
Loving in truth, and fain my love in verse to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful shower upon my sunburnt brain.
But words came halting out, wanting inventions stay;
Invention (Nature’s child) fled step-dame study’s blows:
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my tongue and pen, beating myself for spite:
‘Fool’ said my muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’
This is the first poem from Sidney’s sonnet-cycle Astrophil and Stella. The whole thing tells the story of Astrophil’s passion for Stella. ‘Stella’ means ‘star’ and is Penelope Rich, wife of the future earl of Warwick. ‘Astrophil’ means ‘star-lover’ and is Philip Sidney himself (get the pun?). Does that mean that Philip and Penelope were lovers? A marriage between the pair was suggested before Penelope married Lord Rich, but Sidney turned it down. Perhaps he regretted his decision. There are certainly hints that he and Penelope were lovers — but no compelling evidence. And on their own, the poems don’t prove anything.
The sequence starts with a joke. The first poem is a well-written poem about not being able to write. That’s not to say that it isn’t serious. The first four lines invoke important religious and philosophical ideas. Astrophil records his hope that his poems will give Stella pleasure, that this will motivate her to take the trouble to understand his predicament, and that once she does she will take pity on him and give him what he wants.
Written in the 1580s, the conceit is a mixture of fashionable neo-platonic philosophy and Calvinist theology. Neo-platonism provides the idea that the pleasure we feel when we experience something beautiful (like a good poem or a good-looking woman) can lead us to think about beauty in general, and from there to questions about what we should value and love. Conventionally the answer is virtue. Sidney gives this a theological twist when he describes the ‘grace’ he hopes to win from Stella. ‘Grace’ has a technical meaning in Calvinist theology — it refers to God’s gift of religious belief to those He has chosen to save.
Sidney believed in these ideas. His uncle, the Earl of Leicester, led a political faction which wanted Elizabeth I to raise an army to fight a Calvinist religious war in Europe. Sidney himself went on to die fighting on behalf of Dutch Protestants. And yet he is able to give these ideas a playful turn. Adultery was emphatically not part of philosophers’ idea of virtue, nor of Calvinists’ idea of grace. But that’s what Astrophil is talking about.
So is he a charlatan? No, I don’t think so. The erotic twist is too flamboyant to deceive. If Astrophil (or Sidney) is open to criticism it’s as a show-off. ‘Look how clever I am at playing with these fashionable ideas,’ he seems to be saying. This theme of self-congratulation continues in the rest of the poem. When he writes that his ‘words came halting out’ we know that this is not completely true because we are reading his very accomplished poem.
Nor can we take at face value his claim to have sought inspiration ‘Oft turning others’ leaves’ (i.e. looking for things to copy from other peoples’ books). In actual fact, Sidney was one of the most original poets of his generation and he knew that. He spent a lot of effort trying to invent a new way of counting rhythm and metre in English poetry (he didn’t manage it). He was also fed up with poets who spent all the time imitating the sort of love poetry which had been popular in Italy a hundred years earlier (inspired by the 15th century poet Petrarch). They are the people who really do find all their ideas in old books
So what looks like a confession is actually a manifesto. Astrophil’s implied acceptance of the advice to ‘look in thy heart and write’ is as much a claim by Sidney to have outstripped other writers as it is a declaration of Astrophil’s passion. And the poems aren’t a sort of love-letter to Penelope. In fact, we don’t even know for sure if she ever read them. But plenty of other people would have done. They weren’t printed until after Sidney’s death but, before that, they were circulated in manuscripts. This was a very popular way of publishing poems at the time.
Astrophil and Stella is, in a sense, a public performance. It’s obviously closely connected to Sidney’s own life, but it’s not a direct record of it. Sidney’s used these circumstances to demonstrate his own skills as a poet and to explain his ambitions. As a rising political star, his way with words would not have gone unnoticed in a society where rhetoric was an essential political skill. He certainly wouldn’t be the last politician to write an autobiography.
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