By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Astrophil and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) is the first substantial sonnet sequence in English literature. Although there had been earlier collections that featured sonnets (George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, published in 1573, being perhaps the most notable), and Anne Locke’s religious Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Written in Maner of A Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme of David (1560) takes the prize for the first ever sonnet sequence written in English, Sidney’s was the first long cycle of sonnets on the theme of love.
And what a fine way to kick off the English sonnet-sequence tradition. None of Sidney’s imitators and followers in the form, not even Edmund Spenser (whose Amoretti appeared in print four years after Sidney’s was posthumously published in the 1590s), could match him for linguistic power, self-awareness, and sheer range. Only Shakespeare’s Sonnets improved upon what Sidney had done.
I can remember first dipping into Astrophil and Stella during my first term at university, as an eager (in some respects, at least) 18-year-old student. It wasn’t set reading on any module I was taking, but I’d got the poetry bug as a sixth-former, and opening the university library’s copy of Sidney’s poems was a revelation. Anyone who has experienced unrequited or thwarted love (and that’s all of us, surely?) could do worse than to open Sidney’s account of ‘Astrophil’ (‘star-lover’) pining away for his ‘Stella’ (‘star’).
Although there’s surely a fair bit of self-fashioning and dramatising going on, as there is in most truly great poetry (even Sylvia Plath’s authentic ‘confessional’ poetry contains a fair bit of this), Sidney’s sonnets also carry the weight of authenticity: one senses that Sidney (Astrophil) really did have feelings towards the married Penelope Rich (Stella). Sidney had been offered her in marriage, when she was Penelope Devereux, but had turned her down, only (as the 33rd sonnet reveals) to regret it when she was married off to Robert Rich.
Sidney’s sonnets build to a pitch of passionate longing and frustration which shows he was either a very good liar (and poetry, and fiction, are partly about the art of lying well, as everyone from Plato to Oscar Wilde have reminded us) or a man who had truly experienced the intensity of those emotions, whether over Lady Penelope Rich or someone else. When he came to write Astrophil and Stella in the early 1580s, he’d already cut his teeth on a long prose romance, Arcadia, which had incorporated numerous poetic lyrics.
But there’s something altogether more personal about the public revelation of feeling in these later sonnets, as if we’re eavesdropping on a man, not talking aloud to himself perhaps, but confiding his truest feelings to a trusted coterie of friends. Since Sidney’s sonnets, like many other poems of the era, were probably circulated among friends and associates in manuscript form before they were later published, this analogy may be exactly what Sidney was going for.
Sonnet 30, for my money, marks a turning-point in the sequence. The sudden twist (or ‘volta’) in the poem’s final line still lands like a gut-punch after all these years, and even the slightly old-fashioned (for us) language of ‘cumbered’ and ‘know not how’ cannot detract from the remarkably modern frankness we encounter in the sonnet’s last few words.
Whether the Turkish new moon minded be
To fill his horns this year on Christian coast;
How Polesí right king means, with leave of host,
To warm with ill-made fire cold Muscovy;
If French can yet three parts in one agree;
What now the Dutch in their full diets boast;
How Holland hearts, now so good towns be lost,
Trust in the shade of pleasing Orange tree;
How Ulster likes of that same golden bit
Wherewith my father once made it half tame;
If in the Scotch court be no weltering yet:
These questions busy wits to me do frame.
I, cumbered with good manners, answer do,
But know not how, for still I think of you.
Sidney had used the second-person pronoun ‘you’ before this in the sequence, but this is the first time he directly addresses the woman he loves. Earlier uses of ‘you’ referred to some friend or other, or else to a particular quality that was being personified, or even (as is perhaps the case in the 15th sonnet) to talk to himself.
The first twelve lines of the sonnet make this poem an ideal example for someone teaching a class on ‘understanding poetry in its original context’. Katherine Duncan-Jones’s editorial notes on this poem in my copy of Sidney’s Selected Poems explain the allusions: the Turks remained a threat to Europe at the time, and it was feared they would attack Spain in early summer 1582 (ll. 1-2); the king of Poland had invaded Russia in 1580 (ll. 3-4); the ‘three parts’ of France were the Catholics, Huguenots, and Politiques, who jostled for control of France until 1589 (l. 5); the Germans (not the Dutch, but the ‘Deutsch’) hosted the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire in summer 1582 (l. 6); the Spanish had several decisive victories, while the hope of the Dutch rested in William of Orange (ll. 7-8); Sir Henry Sidney, the poet’s own father and Lord Deputy Governor of Ireland, had subdued Ulster in the 1570s (ll. 9-10); and there was political disorder in Scotland (l. 11).
And then, the killer blow to which Sidney has masterfully been leading us: he has to be a good statesman and courtier and engage in discussions about these current affairs at court, but he never stops thinking about the woman he let slip out of his grasp.