By Dr Oliver Tearle
Astrophil and Stella is one of Elizabethan poetry’s finest and brightest gems. In 108 sonnets and a handful of songs, Sir Philip Sidney produced the first sustained sonnet sequence in English (though not, contrary to popular belief, the very first). Sonnet 39, beginning ‘Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace’, is one of the most widely anthologised poems in the sequence – and this analysis is going to attempt to explain why it remains so popular.