The Columbia History of British Poetry (52 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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tained poetic performance, on the part of both "native" Arcadians and courtly outsiders (including Philisides, Sidney himself in pastoral guise). The poems are impressive in their technical mastery, even though they are sometimes arid and relentlessly long. Sidney clearly set about to show that it was possible to "English" both classical quantitative verse and the various meters and verse forms of Italian poetry. Among the eclogues, there is one great poem"Ye goatherd gods that love the grassy mountains," a sustained lament for an impossible ideal love, in the demanding form of a double sestinaand several highly interesting "public lyrics," including an epithalamion, a pastoral elegy, debates on the nature of love, a praise of solitariness, and a political discourse in the form of a beast fable.
As opposed to these poems,
Astrophel and Stella
has appeared to recent interpreters, who emphasize the social dynamics of Elizabethan courtiership and authorship, to be a coterie poem. There are numerous autobiographical elements in the sequence and a vein of playful wit that goes with the figure of the courtier, not the epic hero. Nevertheless, heroic ideas underlie the literary achievement of
Astrophel and Stella
the rhetorical and representational power of individual sonnets, the ambition of the sequence as a whole, and its sense of consequential human issues. It is certainly significant that Astrophel plays out the conflict between the obligation to noble action in the world and the ambiguous imperatives of love that Spenser represents in Sir Calidore and that Sidney himself made the heroes' central conflict in
Arcadia
.
In
Astrophel and Stella
this conflict could be attributed to Sidney's actual situation in the world of Elizabethan and European politics. We know that there were times when he could have spoken the words that begin sonnet 21: "Your words, my friend, right healthful caustics, blame / My young mind marred." Nevertheless, the most remarkable sonnets in the sequence assimilate the courtier's and lover's conflict to the larger thematics that, for a Renaissance writer, derive from heroic poetry. Consider one of the most famous sonnets:
Who will in fairest book of Nature know,
How Virtue may best lodged in beauty be,
Let him but learn of Love to read in thee,
Stella, those fair lines, which true goodness show.
There shall he find all vices' overthrow,
Not by rude force, but sweetest sovereignty
Of reason, from whose light those night-birds fly,
 
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That inward sun in thine eyes shineth so.
And not content to be Perfection's heir
Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move,
Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair.
So while thy beauty draws the heart to love,
    As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good:
    But ah, Desire still cries, give me some food.
                                                       (sonnet 71)
The Petrarchan sonnet (
Canzoniere
248) from which Sidney takes his first line reveals the difference between the two poets' conception of human love. Petrarch's invitation, "Whoever wishes to see all that Nature and Heaven can do among us," is urgent, because all mortal things pass away: the sting in the tail of his sonnet is that he who does not come in time to see the union of virtue and beauty in one body (Laura's) "will have reason to weep forever." For Sidney, there is no hint of human transiency or of a "kingdom of the blessed" (Petrarch's phrase), which is the true home of virtuous mortals. All the urgency of his sonnet is in testing the claim that loving Stella is equivalent to loving Virtue itself. This is precisely what Sidney, in the
Defence
, claims about the effect of reading heroic poetry and admiring its heroeshence the initial metaphor of reading in "the book of Nature" and the powerful double sense of the fourth line, which assimilates Stella's ''fair lines" (i.e., the lineaments of her face) to the lines of verse, such as the one we are reading, in which the poet represents her goodness.
Sonnet 71 is notorious for the way its final line undoes the idealizing endeavor of the rest of the poem. But the point to observe is that the energy of the endeavor and hence the force of the revealed failure comes from the ideology of human heroism. What is at stake is the power of reason-"rude force" versus "sweetest sovereignty" (there are episodes in
The Faerie Queene
that play out these competing ideas)and the force of the last line comes from the preceding vocabulary of striving and bending love to good.
It is perhaps natural for the modern reader to think that this sonnet sets up an opposition between a general human ideal, represented by the idealized mistress, and the individual first-person lyric speaker. This line of thought gets some support from one of the prominent emphases in
Astrophel and Stella
the poet-lover's frequent scorn of literary conventions and his concomitant insistence that he utters what his own love prompts, rather than "poor Petrarch's long deceased woes"
 
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(sonnet 15). Similarly, in his brief remarks about love poetry in the
Apology
, Sidney says: "Many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistible love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers' writings . . . than that in truth they feel those passions, which easily (as I think) may be betrayed by that same forcibleness or
energia
(as the Greeks call it) of the writer" (pp. 138139).
This may look like a call to express true feeling, but the central emphasis is on rhetoric, persuasive speech. Hence it is not surprising to find that the first-person speaker in
Astrophel and Stella
is generated and defined byrather than merely set in opposition torhetorical and representational conventions. In sonnet 71 the "personal" outcry of the last line is attributed to the personification Desire. Moreover, the power of the line is due not simply to its surprise, but to the way it raises a genuinely allegorical question: Are we to understand this desire as one element in an internal conflict (like the "[de]bate between my will and wit" of sonnet 4) oras the strong voicing suggestshas it taken possession of the poet's whole self?
Another famous final line also puts a supposed personal outcry in the mouth of an allegorical figure. The first sonnet of the sequence represents the poet "loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show," but frustrated by the inadequacy of the "inventions fine" he finds in ''others' leaves." The sonnet concludes:
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating my self for spite,
Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write.
Here the grammar of the sentence (the adjectives and participles that precede the main clause) make one expect that the subject will be "I." Displacing "I" to "my Muse" not only brilliantly suggests a moment of inspiration, but raises the kind of question we have just noticed in sonnet 71: What elements or forces constitute the lyric speaker and the poetic subject?
One could reasonably call Astrophel, the first-person speaker, the "hero" of
Astrophel and Stella
. The sequence concerns a developing situation, even if it does not present a full-fledged story, and some of the eleven "songs" that are interspersed among the 108 sonnets narrate specific episodes. But two other aspects of the sequence, already suggested by the poems we have discussed, bring out more distinct affiliations

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