By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
I’m fond of debunking widely believed but factually erroneous ‘truths’ about literature. It’s one reason I began this blog, some years ago when I still had my youthful bad looks. There’s a wonderful word for such truths-that-turn-out-to-be-not-so-true, and it was coined by Norman Mailer in his biography of Marilyn Monroe. It is the word factoid.
Pleasingly, ‘factoid’ has itself become an example of the very thing it describes, for most people believe a ‘factoid’ to be simply a little fact, a morsel of trivia, a pleasing little gobbet of information. But ‘factoid’ means fact-like: it looks like a fact, but it’s wrong.
But there are some widely held truths that really are true, and are not factoids at all, but just facts. And one of these is that Astrophil and Stella really is the first great English sonnet sequence.
True, there had been sonnet sequences before Sidney’s: Anne Locke (c. 1530-c. 1590) had penned a sequence of 26 sonnets which appeared in 1560, but Locke’s were loose verse translations of the Psalms of David. And George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573) had contained a short sequence of sonnets. But Astrophil and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) was the first long cycle of sonnets (108 of them in all) and it gave English poetry a blueprint for the sonnet sequence.
Whether Sidney (Astrophil) really did love the married Penelope Rich (Stella), we cannot say for certain. Sidney had been offered her in marriage, when she was Penelope Devereux, but he turned her down, only to regret it when she was married off to Robert Rich. At least so the story goes.
Sonnet 11 in Astrophil and Stella is one of a number of slightly cheeky sonnets Sidney wrote addressed to Cupid. But in chastising the boyish god of love, he also accuses Stella of being cold-hearted, for love’s dart never pierced her there. It’s a witty poem and deftly executed.
In truth, O Love, with what a boyish kind
Thou dost proceed in thy most serious ways:
That when the heaven to thee his best displays,
Yet of that best thou leav’st the best behind.
For, like a child that some fair book doth find,
With gilded leaves or colored vellum plays,
Or at the most, on some fine picture stays,
But never heeds the fruit of writer’s mind:
So when thou saw’st, in Nature’s cabinet,
Stella, thou straight look’st babies in her eyes,
In her cheek’s pit thou didst thy pit-fold set,
And in her breast bo-peep or couching lies,
Playing and shining in each outward part:
But, fool, seek’st not to get into her heart.
In other words, ‘Cupid, although your aims are serious, you go about them in the most immature way imaginable. When heaven shows you his most beautiful treasures, you’re more interested in the rubbish than in the really good stuff.’
That’s how Sidney kicks off his verbal kicking of the bewinged one, and he’s only just getting started on Cupid. In the next four lines, Cupid is likened to a child that finds a beautiful book and just stares at the pictures without bothering to read the words. How little has changed in four centuries; we still hear this sort of complaint about ‘kids today’ … well, today.
Then comes the sestet: the six-line unit that concludes the sonnet, after the octave (the first eight lines) has established the poem’s conceit. Cupid spied Stella in Mother Nature’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’ (a repository in which wealthy gentlemen would keep and show off their most valued trinkets and objets d’art: originally, it wasn’t an actual cabinet, but a whole room), which is where Stella belongs, after all, as she’s one of nature’s greatest and most striking achievements (according to Sidney/Astrophil).
But because Cupid is so childish, he sees Stella’s eyes and ‘look’st babies’ in them. This is a strange image, but perhaps Cupid sees his babyish features reflected back at him in Stella’s eyes. He doesn’t see beyond their surface; if the eyes are the windows to the soul, then Cupid sees them simply as mirrors reflecting his own childish cherubic face back at him. (Curiously, my copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs informs me that the proverb about the eyes being windows to the soul was in circulation in English by 1545, several decades before Sidney wrote this sonnet.)
Similarly, in the pit of Stella’s (dimpled) cheeks, Cupid established his own ‘pit-fold’ or pitfall which would trip him up. But the line ‘And in her breast bo-peep or couching lies’ is again troublesome: ‘bo-peep’ refers to the child’s game of ‘peek-a-boo’, so the suggestion is that Cupid imagines himself lying (or literally lays himself) within Stella’s breast (between them, we may assume), with ‘couching’ suggesting lying back in a relaxed way (it’s an archaic term that has long fallen out of use, but it survives in an extended sense in the idea of ‘couching’ an idea in certain words, usually to soften their blow).
So, Cupid is lying in an overly relaxed way between Stella’s breasts, or peeping out from them like a child playing peek-a-boo.
Sidney concludes the sonnet by reiterating that Cupid is only concerned with the ‘outward part’ of Stella: he hasn’t made any attempt to ‘get into her heart’. This clever twist in the final line carries a double significance. Cupid cannot understand Stella’s feelings because he is too immature to penetrate her heart and examine her emotions. But Cupid is also the one who is meant to strike his dart into the heart of those who are meant to fall in love.
In other words, he’s been too distracted by Stella’s outward beauty to do what he’s supposed to do, which is make her fall in love (with Astrophil). In one neat little conceit, Sidney combines the idea of Stella being strikingly beautiful and hard-hearted towards him. But at least he’s blaming Cupid for this, even if he is making a sly dig at Stella, too.