‘No More, My Dear’: Sidney’s Sonnet 64 from Astrophil and Stella

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

I’ve blogged before about Astrophil and Stella, the first major sonnet sequence in English literature. Written in the early 1580s and published in 1591, five years after the death of its author, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), this cycle of 108 sonnets and 11 songs catalogues the thoughts and feelings of a ‘star-lover’ (Astrophil) for his ‘star’ (Stella).

The real-life Astrophil is, loosely, Sidney himself, an all-round ‘Renaissance man’ in both the literal and extended sense of the phrase. Courtier, soldier, statesman, poet, and pioneer of the ‘novel’ (if we view his prose work Arcadia as a proto-novel), Sidney is believed to have written the sonnets after the woman he had been offered in marriage, and turned down, married another man, only for Sidney (sorry, Astrophil) to realise he’d made a terrible mistake. ‘Stella’ is Lady Penelope Rich (née Devereux).

The 64^th sonnet in the sequence sees Astrophil begging Stella to let him love her, since although the passion he carries for her may be futile, it is the thing that drives him and makes everything good about him:

No more, my dear, no more these counsels try;
Oh, give my passions leave to run their race;
Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace;
Let folk o’ercharg’d with brain against me cry;
Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye;
Let me no steps but of lost labour trace;
Let all the earth with scorn recount my case,
But do not will me from my love to fly.
I do not envy Aristotle’s wit,
Nor do aspire to Caesar’s bleeding fame;
Nor aught do care though some above me sit;
Nor hope nor wish another course to frame,
But that which once may win thy cruel heart:
Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art.

In other words, ‘Let me suffer with love for you, Stella, even though it may lead to me becoming a laughing-stock, my reputation ruined; and even though wiser and brighter men may tell me to give it up. Allow me to be miserable and waste my time and effort in trying to woo you, even if people ridicule me for it. Just don’t tell me to desert this love I bear for you. I don’t long to be as clever as Aristotle, or as celebrated as the assassinated Julius Caesar. I don’t care that there are people higher in social status than I am. I don’t want to change my life. All I want is to keep on trying to win your love, even though you’re a cold, uncaring woman. You, Stella, are all that’s good in me: my cleverness and my goodness come from trying to woo you.’

Stella is depicted as cruel in that penultimate line. But Astrophil loves her anyway. No, more than that: he wants to love her anyway. Even if someone told him they could wave a magic wand and he’d no longer be bound by this futile ambition to try to win her, he wouldn’t want them to do so. He doesn’t want to be relieved of his hopeless quest.

The logical question to ask is: why? Masochism? Habit? What’s in it for him?

For one, he doesn’t accept it’s a hopeless quest. As that penultimate line reveals, he still thinks he’s in with a chance. Deluded? Perhaps. The poem itself, we sense, is the vehicle whereby he reckons he can change her mind: show her how devoted an admirer he is, and she’ll melt. It’s unlikely to happen, but it might happen.

Perhaps he thinks her heart is only ‘cruel’ now. Once he wins her, she’ll become the virtuous, kind, compassionate woman he always knew she was, deep down.

Sidney uses the Petrarchan sonnet form here, but he uses it to do some curious things. The two halves of the octave, or initial eight-line section, are joined together not just by their shared a and b rhymes, but by the hinge of ‘cry’ and ‘eye’, semantically joining the fourth and fifth lines. And he makes use of that English innovation of the concluding rhyming couplet, joining Stella’s ‘heart’ to his finer qualities (there’s possibly a pun on ‘art’, too, suggesting the art of poetry-writing).

Sidney’s choice of Aristotle and (Julius) Caesar at the start of the poem’s sestet is interesting. He doesn’t want to be as clever, as analytical, as philosophical (or even as scientific? Aristotle was revered as a sort of forerunner to the ‘natural philosophers’ of the Renaissance: what we’d now call ‘scientists) as Aristotle, because if he were, he might realise his foolish doe-eyed adoration of Stella is … well, foolish. He’d rather live in ignorance (and hope, however distant).

As for Caesar, he doesn’t envy his ‘bleeding fame’: that is, the fame attached to Caesar because he was killed by Brutus and the other conspirators (and didn’t say ‘Et tu, Brute’). Does this mean he doesn’t want to be renowned? He’d rather remain an obscure public figure and love Stella? But why the emphasis on renown in death?

The point is surely that Caesar, in being assassinated the way he was, became immortal: ‘Caesar’ became the name for the emperors who came after him, in his honour (he was named Caesar but wasn’t a Caesar, or emperor: he was just a ruler or dictator), and eventually gave us the German kaiser and the Russian tsar, meaning the same thing.

Astrophil doesn’t crave such immortality that would ensure his name echoed down the ages. This is ironic, in many ways, since the real-life Astrophil – Sir Philip Sidney himself – would become celebrated after his heroic death in battle in 1586, his name a byword for the honour, courage, and manliness. He never got Stella, but he did get his ‘bleeding fame’.