A reader recently asked me to compare Sidney’s Sonnets 1 & 2 as help for a school assignment. I wrote a brief email, let the email stew, and then decided it was a shame not to develop the ideas into a proper post. So, if on the short side, here it is. If you’re under the age of 18, be warned, Elizabethan ‘Love’ Poetry is commonly rated somewhere between R and XXX.
Sonnet 1
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear She might take some pleasure in my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
····I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burn’d brain.
····But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay,
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
····Biting my truand pen, beating myself for spite,
····“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write”.
The first item to notice is that the sonnet isn’t iambic pentameter, but iambic hexameter (a six foot iambic line):
Trochee|Iamb······|Iamb······|Iamb·····|Iamb·····|Iamb
/·······∪·|∪·····/·····|∪······/···|∪···/····|∪·····/···|∪···/
“Loving | in truth, | and fain | in verse | my love | to show,”
1···········|2············|3············|4············|5···········|6
Sidney’s sonnets alternate between pentameter and hexameter and I’m not aware of any rock solid explanations for why he chose one meter for one sonnet and another for the next. My own guess, simply put, is that he was showing off. The only hint we have is from Sidney himself:
“The ancient marked the quantity of each syllable, and according to that framed his verse, the modern observing only number…. Now for the rhyme [modern accentual verse], though we do not observe quantity, yet we observe the accent very precisely, which other languages either cannot do, or will not do so absolutely. That caesura, or breathing place in the midst of the verse, neither Italian nor Spanish have, the French and we never almost fail of.”
This is from Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy. What it tells us is that Sidney was keenly interested in the poetry and metrical practices on other languages, ancient and modern. Why? Because Elizabethan poets were still in search of a “native meter”. (Except for three or four scholars, who were thought to be mad-hatters, no one recognized Chaucer’s verse as being Iambic Pentameter simply because they didn’t know how to pronounce middle English.) They tried importing classical quantitative meter into English (for that instant classical burnish) but the English language was having none of it. As Sidney argues, English observes “only number” or the accent. The French alexandrine on the other hand, the twelve syllable line, was something that could be imported into English. The thinking, I suppose, was that English, by dressing itself in the triumphal robes of other languages, might prove itself their equal. But English had to do its own way; and soon enough that would be iambic pentameter.
For Sidney, possibly, the future of English meter was undecided. It might be iambic pentameter or it might be iambic hexameter (an English Alexandrine). I’m guessing he might have keen to display his, and the English language’s suitability and prowess in both meters; and in either case he may have wanted to set the example, himself the model of the multi-faceted and versatile Elizabethan.
- The whole notion of falling in love, as a pre-requisite to marriage (and therefore sanctioned sex), would have been somewhat foreign to Elizabethans. Marriages in the upper classes were mostly social contracts. Besides that, the word Love didn’t carry the same full-throated romantic connotations. In fact, up until the start of the 20th century, love-making didn’t refer to sex but, innocently, to verbal expressions of tenderness. Sidney’s use of the word Love is likewise unlike modern usage. In sonnet 52 he’ll position Love and Virtue in opposition to one another, which might strike a modern reader as odd. But ‘Love’, for Sidney (or for Astrophil), means sex, the physical connection more than the modern emotional or romantic connection:
Well Love, since this demur our suit doth stay
····Let Virtue have that Stella’s self; yet thus,
····That Virtue but that body grant to us.
Worth also noticing is Sidney’s mention of the caesura typical of French poetry, probably his favored model . In hexameter lines, the midline pause can nicely divide the line into two 6 foot halves, and it’s possible that this symmetrical elegance appealed to Sidney more than asymmetric pauses usually typical of pentameter verse. One could split pantemater evenly, but one would be forced to divide the third in half, not uncommon but more typical of later and blank verse (as opposed to rhymed sonnets and the like). Sidney used his first sonnet to exploit that “breathing space”, or midline pause, for a flashy display of rhetoric and parallelism.
conduplicatio and diacope
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
anadiplosis and isocolon [ ]
That the dear She [might take some pleasure] in my pain:
Pleasure [might cause her read,] reading [might make her know,]
Knowledge [might pity win,] and pity grace obtain…
Isocolon can produce especially powerful and memorable effects. What kind of effects depends on the context and the context, in this case, reinforces a methodically determined lover carefully laying out his seduction the way a military strategist might draw up a battle plan. In his own day, Sidney was known as the consummate courtier—a militant Protestant who would soon be killed on the battle field. Worth noting is that the hexameter gives Sidney greater scope for this sort of elaboration. As we’ll see, pentameter demands a pithier and more elliptical argument. There are 28 fewer syllables in a pentameter sonnet, almost three fewer lines. The whole of the quatrain is also an example of Gradatio. Joe Albernaz, “Fit Words to Paint”: The Rhetoric of Courtship and Courtiership in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella“, explaining the importance of the figure, quotes Sokol extensively:
“The uses in the first two sonnets of Astrophil and Stella of the figure gradatio are rhetorically “thick” in the sense that they speak not only on the level of syntax and surface semantics, but also on the level of poetic structures conveying tone. This practice allows a profound engagement between verbal form and poetic purpose. ¶ These particular uses of gradatio involve play upon, and not only within, its rhetorical scheme. Specifically, the start of Astrophil and Stella successively flaunts and then flouts the rigid form of gradatio. Sidney’s purpose is to reference the distinctive shape of the scheme in service of an underlying expressive strategy.”
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burn’d brain.
The second quatrain continues the ABAB rhyme scheme of the first quatrain, but the argument and rhetoric changes. Worth noting is how Sidney makes use of the midline pause, nicely dividing the hexamater line in two (an effect we don’t find in Sidney’s Pentameter sonnets) :
Studying inventions fine || her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves || to see if thence would flow
Also worth mentioning is to what degree Shakespeare was influenced by Sidney, so much so that one might almost call a number of Shakespeare’s sonnets variations on Sidneys. Where Sidney will next complain that he lacks “Invention” (ideas):
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay,
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
- “other’s feet” refers to the poetry (meter) of others.
So does Shakespeare:
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child!
Sonnet 59
Or:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Sonnet 76
Also, Sidney’s conceit of the “Nature’s child, [fleeing] step-dame Study’s blows” has always reminded me of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 143, though in this case the resemblance is probably superficial.
Notice again the caesuras in the third quatrain:
But words came halting forth || wanting Invention’s stay,
Invention, Nature’s child || fled step-dame Study’s blows…
Thus great with child to speak || and helpless in my throes,
So what we have is this: Sidney claims he lacks “Invention” all whilst displaying the very pinnacle of Elizabethan inventiveness. But Sindey has a great sense of humor (much ignored by other commentators). He himself recognizes the absurdity and self-contradictory posturing of his lines. The irony isn’t lost on him and becomes the butt of the joke. He skewers it all in the closing couplet:
Biting my truand pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write”.
The contrast is pointed. In other words: Stop your damned showing-off and simply tell her you love her. So his Muse isn’t saying: if you want to be inventive, write from the heart; but just the opposite: stop your damned intellectual preening (Invention) and be genuine (write from the heart). The joke is that Sidney’s Muse isn’t fooled by his rhetorical posturing, (though readers sometimes are).
But there’s another joke. If this were the only Sonnet that Sidney had written then we might easily read the last line at face value, as a quasi-romantic pledge to write from the heart, feelingly, instead of “rhetorically”. But Sidney was a young man and hot-blooded. Virtue, in Elizabethan times, meant different things for men and women. (Elizabethans were apparently untroubled by the contradictory rules that understood womanly virtue as chastity and manly virtue as the conquest of that same chastity.)
The second thing to consider is freedom of speech in Elizabethan England. It was emphatically not free. (Although if you didn’t mind your body parts being nailed to a wall, the sky was the limit.) Wanton, lewd, lascivious speech was dutifully and appropriately frowned on but immensely enjoyed. If you were a Shakespeare, knowing what the audience liked and knowing your play had to get past the “Office of the Revels”—whose job was to weed out profanity, heresy, or politics—then you made use of a sort of “thieves cant” that consisted of universally understood puns and allusions. And among the most common of these puns was the Hart (the stag) and the Hind—the male and female deer respectively. And do I really need to explain this any further? Heart and behind? And where, do we suppose, will we find a man’s “heart” when he’s in lust? And what of a woman’s anatomy does he especially pursue?
“If a hart do lack a hind, Let him seek out Rosalind.” As You Like It III.ii.99
Now, having been brought up to speed, what do you suppose an Elizabethan would have made of Sidney’s final line?
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write”.
There’s a reason this is the first sonnet. It clues the reader into the sonnets that will follow. Yes, they’ll be romantic but you’re going to miss the fun if you don’t read between the lines. Don’t think that Sidney’s “heart” isn’t also a reference to his libido and that other part of his anatomy keenly interested in Stella’s seduction.
(c) National Trust, Knole; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
Sonnet 2
Not at first sight, nor with a dribbed shot
····Love gave the wound, which while I breathe will bleed:
····But known worth did in mine of time proceed,
Till by degrees it had full conquest got.
I saw and liked, I liked but loved not,
····I loved, but straight did not what Love decreed:
····At length, to Love’s decrees, I forced, agreed,
Yet with repining at so partial lot.
····Now even that footstop of lost liberty
Is gone, and now like slave-born Muscovite,
I call it praise to suffer tyranny;
And now employ the remnant of my wit,
····To make myself believe, that all is well,
····While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.
In the second sonnet, notice that there’s much less rhetorical embroidery. Sidney appears to use the shorter lines as a means to a tighter argument. The whole sonnet, I think, could be construed as exploiting a single rhetorical figure: Correctio or Epanothorsis. The first quatrain sets up the context, and then each line, in effect, corrects the one before until Sidney lands himself in “my hell”. Is it really, though? Consider Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.
···All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
···To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
I personally find it impossible not to think that Shakespeare knowingly rewrote Sidney’s sonnet (and improved it). But my reason for posting it is so that you’ll notice the last word—hell. Hell is the butt (literally) of the joke. There’s a reason that it’s the one word Shakespeare didn’t change. Why?
hell vagina In LrF IV.vi.124, the sexual parts arouse loathing ‘There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Etc. [Shakespeare’s Sexual Language: A Glossary]
hell, in Sonnet 144, ‘I guess one angel in another’s hell’ = I suspect that my good male friend (‘the better angel’) is copulating with ‘the worser spirit a woman colour’d ill’. Not impossibly, Shakespeare here alludes to the famous Bocaccio story of ‘putting the devil in hell’. [Shakespeare’s Bawdy]
Given the subject matter of both sonnets, I think anyone who argues against the pun is going to be on the losing end. But there’s more.
employ occupy sexually. In KJ I.i.96, ‘Your brother did employ my father much’ earns the quibbling response: ‘Your tale must be how he employed my mother.’ [Shakespeare’s Sexual Language: A Glossary]
And:
wit semen; pudendum? …A good example of wit-semen occurs in Rudyerd (1599) p. 43, on a lover’s entertaining his mistress, so ‘that once in three days he speak with some spice of Wit, and to the purpose twice every night if it be possible’. [Shakespeare Sexual Langauge: A Glossary]
wit | whit | white Puns on each other and on genitals. Jonson, The Alchemist, II, iii: Mammon spies Dol Common (each part of her name means a mistress – F&H; P), a ‘brave piece’: ‘Is she no way accessible? no means/ No trick to give a man a taste of her — wit — / Or so?’ In archery, 15th c., the white or target was placed on a butt and was called a prick (LLL, iv.i.134: ‘let the mark have a prick in it’). ‘Prick’, like a whit, is a minute particle’ (OED) Etc. [A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and their Significance]
- In Sonnet 4, Astrophil will write: “Virtue, alas, now let me take some rest./Thou set’st a bate between my will and wit.” If we take wit in its usual meaning, then the line is somewhat redundant, but if wit takes on its bawdy meaning, then its argument with will (angelic reason) makes more sense.
And:
Paint 1. Pander, Peindre (Cot), to paint. Dekker and Middleton, The Honest Whore I, n.i: ‘What you are old, and can well paynt no more,/You Turne Baw’. Cosmetic paint or ‘fucus’ (Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, v.ii) may have connoted ‘fucks’ (F&H; fottarie — F). Painted brothel panels (Dekker’s ‘painted cloth rhymes’ — CD) bore cheap sentiments: ‘traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths’ (TrCI, v.x.46) …. iv.ii.38 Pompey, ‘unlawul bawd’, tells Abhorsen, executioner, ‘Painting… is a mystery; and your whores… being members of my occupation, using painting, do prove my occupation a mystery…’ Painting is a MYSTERY (prostitution)…. [A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and their Significance]
And:
feel ‘Sampson. Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads; take it in which sense thou wilt. — Gregory. They must take it in sense that feel it. — Sampson. Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and ’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh’, R & J, I i 24-28. ¶ The same semantic idea—here again is Shakespeare the forerunner, perhaps the progenitor!—resides in the C.18 slang old hat, ‘prudend’ (because often felt), and the erotic stress stress on ‘feeling’, with the suggestive removal of the hyphen, in the C.20 fast girls’ recast of the proverbial saying, a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. ¶ The word has an Aryan base that = ‘to strike gently’.
And now consider the last three lines of Sidney’s sonnet:
And now employ the remnant of my wit,
····To make myself believe, that all is well,
····While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.
Now, if it were only one of these words, and if it weren’t in the context of a horny courtier who will write a sonnet sequence stuffed with double entendres and sexual puns (see Sexual Puns in Atrophil and Stella by Alan Sinfield), then one might reasonably dismiss this all. In discussing the word wit for example, Gordon Williams (Shakespeare’s Sexual Language) rightly points out that the word “occupied a much more central place in Elizabethan discourse than in ours; the word is used incessantly and with multiple colorings.” The point being that it becomes “almost impossible to tell when writers had been using wit ambiguously and when not.” Granted, but consider the context. As Sinfield writes in Sexual Puns:
“Even in recent critical studies and annotated editions, most of which have a lot to offer, commentators have been slow to appreciate, or to help the reader appreciate, the sexual inferences in the poems. I suggest that Astrophil’s consciousness of the sexual nature of his passion for Stella is more extensive and more important than is usually implied.” [Sexual Puns in Atrophil and Stella p. 1]
He will later add:
“I want to make two further claims: that sexual double-entendre is an important feature of Sidney’s verbal skill and, following this, that Astrophil’s love for Stella is sexual right from the beginning of the sequence.” [Ibid. p. 3]
Then suggests five criteria or discerning sexual puns:
“First, the interpretations proposed should use senses demonstrably current in the langauge; second, in their immediate context they should be consistent with each other and with other levels of meaning; third (in other than short poems) they should be appropriate to the theme and its treatment in the work as a whole; fourth, they should make the poetry appear better—more subtle, dense and interesting; and fifth, they should be compatible with the known practice of the poet and his contemporaries in that kind of poem.” [Ibid. p. 3]
The proposed double entendres of Sonnet 2 meets all those criteria. And if the last lines are read as the double entendres one can conclude that Astrophil, contrary to the entire history of critical interpretation, did in fact consummate his affair with Stella; and that the entire sequence is not an effort to obtain what he will never have, but to win back what he lost. The sequence can be read consistently either way. That said, one might point out that Atrophil, in Sonnet 78, asserts that Stella’s husband has not been cuckolded:
Is it not evil that such a devil wants [lacks] horns?
But there’s nothing saying the sequence doesn’t begin before she’s married. And consider further that most critics agree that Stella was inspired by Penelope Devereux (who would become Lady Rich, husband of Lord Rich).
“One of the most intense and ongoing scholarly debates regarding Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella is concerned with exactly how much, if any, of the sequence is autobiographical (such biographical criticism is not uncommon with regard to Elizabethan sonneteers; the degree of autobiography in Shakespeare’s sonnets is also thoroughly questioned and debated). While proponents of the Sidney-as-Astrophil view point to the clever nominal puns (the most salient being Phil-Astrophil, and the numerous puns on the word “rich” – the married name of Penelope Devereux, a supposed love interest of Sidney’s) and apparent references to events in Sidney’s life, other critics have warned readers of Sidney to be cautious in such areas.” [Fit Words to Paint”: The Rhetoric of Courtship and Courtiership in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella]
And then there’s this:
Perhaps the most telling piece of evidence, assuming we can believe it, is from an account of Sidney’s death-bed confession recorded by George Gifford, one of the divines who attended him in his final illness: “There came to my remembrance a vanity wherein I had taken delight, whereof I had not rid myself. It was my Lady Rich. But I rid myself of it, and presently my joy and comfort returned with a new hours.” [Sir Phillip Sidney: Selected Writings edited by Richard Dutton p. 19]
If the confession is true, and if Astrophil and Stella is in any way biographical, then what to make of it? If we interpret “vanity” as Sidney confessing to having had an affair with Penelope Devereux, then how do we square that with “Atrophil’s” assertion that the husband was never cuckolded. The answer is that the dalliance occurred before she was married—and it is to this dalliance that Sonnet 2 confesses. Further, this might further explain Stella’s odd indulgence toward Astrophil (they have some history); but once she’s married, she cannot and will not be unfaithful.
Not at first sight, nor with a dribbed shot
····Love gave the wound, which while I breathe will bleed:
- Astrophil “bleeds”, meaning that their meeting is the wound that won’t heal. He can’t forget her. dribbed: random
····But known worth did in mine of time proceed,
Till by degrees it had full conquest got.
- Progressively, his platonic appreciation becomes an obsession beyond his control. The next several lines detail this “conquest” over him. in mine: by way of a mine (as in planting mines beneath a cities fortifications and thus undermining them); of time as in time’s mine: did [by way of time’s undermining] proceed…
I saw and liked, I liked but loved not,
····I loved, but straight did not what Love decreed:
- “did not what love decreed” Meaning that he did not actively court her.
····At length, to Love’s decrees, I forced, agreed,
Yet with repining at so partial lot.
[Eventually, he courts her, yet “repines” (is not content), with merely courting her (partial lot).]
····Now even that footstop of lost liberty
Is gone, and now like slave-born Muscovite,
I call it praise to suffer tyranny;
- And here is where interpreting the sonnet gets dicey. What does he mean by “even that footstop of lost liberty/ Is gone”? What has he done? How does one go beyond courting without consummating the courtship? The conventional interpretation is that whereas “courting” had been in his control (in the sense that he was the pursuer and could break off the courtship), he has now become slave to the pursuit. No other woman is a possibility.
And now employ the remnant of my wit,
····To make myself believe, that all is well,
····While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.
If we read the next three lines as double entendres, however, Astrophil tells us something else.
And now employ [sexually occupy] the remnant [remains] of my wit [semen],
····To make myself believe, that all is well,
····While with a feeling skill [removing her hymen/taking her virginity] I paint [fuck] my [his lover’s] hell [vagina].
If interpreted this way, then Sonnet 2 confesses what got Astrophil into this mess. I expect that most, if not all, scholars would object that this entirely disrupts and undercuts the Patrarchan (if not moral) underpinnings of the sonnet sequence, but that somewhat puts the cart before the horse—those moral and philosophical underpinnings are themselves matters of interpretation. Personally I find either scenario compelling, though if I had to choose I would probably go with the more conventional interpretation. The use of the word now suggests this isn’t a memory and if hell is really to be interpreted as Stella’s vagina, then it’s not his but Stella’s (enforced elsewhere in the sonnet sequence). Here’s a more likely interpretation, perhaps, that preserves the double entendres:
And now employ [sexually occupy/spend/masturbate] the remnant [remains] of my wit [semen],
····To make myself believe, that all is well,
····While with a feeling skill [the skill of the seducer] I paint [describe (the sequence being like “painted brothel panels”] my hell [the vagina he longs for].
·
This more closely conforms to Sidney’s usage of paint in Sonnet 1 “I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe”. The notion of Astrophil coming, masturbating, spending will appear later in Sonnet 18:
·
Unable quite to pay even Nature’s rent,
Which unto it by birthright I do owe:
And which is worse, no good excuse can show,
But that my wealth I have most idly spent.
To spend was a common euphemism for achieving orgasm. As Alan Sinfeld points out, Shakespeare (again, possibly inspired by Sidney) will use the same theme and imagery in his Sonnet 4:
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank, she lends to those are free.
- Jonathan Smith, Professor of English at Hanover College, whose wonderful blog Blogging Sidney’s Sonnets analyses all of Sidney’s Sonnets, doesn’t address the potential double entendres, but nevertheless offers a compelling interpretation:
“There are at least two distinct possibilities, and in this case I think we do well to accept both, and thus enrich the poem’s meaning through ambiguity; as Benedick says, “There’s a double meaning in that!” Duncan-Jones’s endnote opts for Hamlet’s understanding of “paint” as giving “a false colouring or complexion to,” or in the crude American political vernacular, “putting lipstick on a pig.” So in that sense, the speaker admits to using optimistic descriptions of a love relationship to “pretty up” what is really a hellish state he has gotten into. It could similarly be said that line 5 of Sonnet 1, “I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe” refers to putting false make-up on an ugly face (blackness being equated with ugliness in Renaissance-speak). But just as clearly, that line occurs in the midst of a description of the struggle to create art, so it carries the ambiguity of “paint” as “create art.” [Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 2]
So, perhaps all of that wets your appetite for Astrophil and Stella? If possible, I recommend Alan Sinfeld’s essay, Sexual Puns in Atrophil and Stella. Part I of this essay, Sidney and Astrophil is also worth reading. And for an analysis of all of Sidney’s Sonnets: Blogging Sidney’s Sonnets.
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