THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Although Stella is portrayed as the enabler of poetry, she is also the star, ‘the onely Planet of my light’, who in
sonnet 68 seeks to quench the star-lover’s ‘noble fire’. Throughout the sequence, the ‘noble’ concerns of a soldier and
courtier intrude only to be frustrated by a woman who commands chivalric service and who exercises a sometime
whimsical authority over those who willingly give her service. She who elevates by virtue of her heavenly nature also
degrades. That Stella’s star-like authority seems at times to parallel that of the Queen, of whose enigmatic political
behaviour Sidney complained in his letters, is scarcely coincidental. The imagery of war moulds the urgent sonnet 20
(‘Flie, fly, my friends, I have my death wound; fly’), while the jouster and the knight figure in sonnets 41, 49, and 53;
the state of contemporary European politics gives an edge to sonnets 8, 29, and 30 (‘Whether the Turkish new-moone
minded be | To fill his hornes this yeare on Christian coast’), but as Stella asserts her royal command over Astrophil
she effectively distracts and confounds alternative enterprise, interposing her imperial presence and her sovereign will
even in the face of courtly debate (‘These questions busie wits to me do frame; | I, cumbred with good maners, answer
do, | But know not how, for still I thinke of you’). Her face is ‘Queen Vertue’s court in sonnet 9; her heart is a citadel
‘fortified with wit, stor’d with disdaine’ in sonnet 12; she seems to allow her lover the ‘monarchie’ of her heart in
sonnet 69, though, as he recognizes at the end of the poem, ‘No kings be crown’d but they some covenants make’; in
the penultimate sonnet, 107, she emerges as a ‘Princesse’ and a ‘Queene, who from her presence sends | Whom she
imployes’ and who provokes fools to comment scornfully on the absolute demands of her rule.
[p. 111]
The influence of Astrophil and Stella on later English sonneteers was profound. Within Sidney’s own circle of
family and sympathetic friends his sonnets exercised a particular authority over the poetry of his younger brother
Robert (1563-1626). Sir Robert Sidney (created Viscount L’Isle in 1605, and Earl of Leicester in 1618) left his
surviving poems in a manuscript collection which was edited and published in its entirety only in 1984. His sonnets,
like his brother’s, are interspersed with longer songs and, though they tend to lack the range, the wit, and the
carefully modulated shifts of mood of Astrophil and Stella, they too project an often ambiguous picture of a selffashioning,
self-indulging male lover. The sixth song (‘Yonder comes a sad pilgrim’), for example, is shaped as a
pseudo-medieval dialogue between a pilgrim returning from the East and the Lady to whom he narrates the
circumstances of her melancholy and frustrated lover’s death (‘Near unto the sea this knight | Was brought to his last
will; | Present cares were his delight, | Absent joys did him kill’). His most striking poems are characterized by their
vividly dark, almost obsessive meditations on what are so often the poetic commonplaces of transience, decay, and
dissolution. The brief seventeenth song broods pessimistically on the approach of night and ponders ‘what trust is
there to a light | that so swift flyes’, while the thirty-first sonnet (‘Forsaken woods, trees with sharp storms oppressed’)
considers a devastated winter landscape and contrasts two perceptions of Time: ‘they who knew Time, Time will find
again: | I that fair times lost, on Time call in vain’. The twenty-sixth sonnet (‘Ah dearest limbs, my life’s best joy and
stay’) opens with the complaint of a wounded man contemplating the amputation of his gangrenous limbs, and draws
out a parallel between desperate diseases and the state of the crippled and emotionally corrupted lover:
My love, more dear to me than hands or eyes,
Nearer to me than what with me was born,
Delayed, betrayed, cast under change and scorn,
Sick past all help or hope, or kills or dies;
While all the blood it sheds my heart doth bleed
And with my bowels I his cancers feed.
Philip Sidney’s fatally, but cleanly wounded, lover of ‘Flie, fly, my friends’ was the victim of Cupid’s darts; his
brother’s lover is threatened with a lingering, painful, and probably terminal infection.
Mary Sidney (1561-1621), who married Henry, second Earl of Pembroke in 1577, provided a centre for the Sidney
circle at her home at Wilton House. At Wilton Philip Sidney wrote the Arcadia for her and there she gathered around
her a distinguished group of poets, intellectuals, and Calvinistically-inclined theologians all intent on continuing her
brother’s cultural mission after his untimely death. It was Mary who approved the posthumous publication of Philip
Sidney’s works and she who made her own quite distinct contribution to English poetry by revising and continuing
her brother’s verse translation of the
[p. 112]
Psalms (first published in 1823). This enterprise, essentially in keeping with the devoutly Protestant tone of the little
court at Wilton, reveals Mary Sidney as a remarkably resourceful experimenter with words and sounds. Where Philip