1.

The author opens this first sonnet by explaining his motivation for composing the sonnet
sequence. He believes that if his love were to read the sonnets, she would eventually return his
affection. He argues that her pleasure in his pain would cause her to read his sonnets, and her
reading of the sonnets would allow her to know the extent of his affection, which might make her
pity the author's situation and this pity may transform into grace and love.

The author also describes his difficulties in composing the sonnet sequence. He has struggled to
express the pain and misery of his emotions and has tried to look at other poets' works in order to
gain inspiration. Still, he has been unsuccessful. Finally, the author has realised that the only way
to fully express his love for Stella in his poetry is to write from his heart.

Analysis: Sidney's actions of writing about how to compose a love sonnet allow him to do just
that: compose a love sonnet. With this in mind, he warns the reader that the emotions expressed
in the entire sonnet sequence stem directly from the heart thus, he cannot be held rationally
responsible. The statements in this first sonnet make clear that Sidney (who already can be
identified with the author of the love sonnets) is conflicted in his role as a zealous lover and a
self-critical poet. This sonnet demonstrates the first of many clashes between reason and passion
that appear in the sonnet sequence. He already seems to know that he will never truly win Stella,
but he cannot help but desire her. This conflict between contradicting forces is a crucial element
of the sequence.

Sonnet 1.

in the first sonnet, Sidney introduces us to the poet / lover, struggling to find the words to put the
pain of his love for Stella. He seeks “fit words to paint the blackest face of woe.” In other words,
he wants to find the best way with his poetry to show how miserable he is. He hopes that his
words of misery “the dear She might take some pleasure of my pain,” and then argues from lines
3 -5 that if she reads his sonnets, she would realize how in love he is, come to pity him, and this
pity would somehow turn into love for him. (Notice right away that the poet’s motives and
rationalization is not the best.)

From lines 6 – 9, the poet racks his brain, trying to come up with “inventions,” or clever turns of
phrase, “Of turning others’ leaves,” meaning looking at other poet’s works to find inspiration.
But “words came halting forth.”

Lines 12 – 13, a typical place for an emotional climax in a sonnet, the poet feels so tortured he
describes it like giving birth to a child. But then his Muse tells him, “Fool, look in thy heart and
write.” The advice of the Muse means that the poet, Astrophil, is beating his brains too much,
and the he must turn inward to his heart, or his passions. Right away there is a cautionary ring to
this, similar to the Wife of Bath invoking “Experience” as her source in her Prologue. As I said in
the previous post, Passion in the Renaissance is a dangerous, untrustworthy human faculty, so to
abandon the mind, or Reason, means to forgo ones clear thinking.

Sonnet 1.

A Short Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Loving in Truth’

Posted by interestingliterature
A summary of sonnet I from Astrophil and Stella
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) is often credited with writing the first sonnet sequence in English,
and he was certainly the first English poet to write a long cycle of sonnets. Composed in the
early 1580s, Astrophil and Stella (sometimes Astrophel and Stella) is a sequence of
108 sonnets – and a few songs – inspired by Sidney’s unrequited love for Penelope Rich
(nee Devereux), who was offered to him as a potential wife a few years before. Sidney turned her
down, she married Lord Robert Rich, and Sidney promptly realised he was in love with her.
What follows is a brief analysis of the opening sonnet in the sequence, beginning ‘Loving in
Truth, and fain in verse my love to show’.
How autobiographical the sonnets in Astrophil and Stella actually are is disputed, and many
scholars incline towards thinking Sidney is adopting a persona in these poems. Still, ‘Astrophil’
(meaning ‘star-lover’; sometimes rendered as ‘Astrophel’) is clearly meant to bring ‘Philip
Sidney’ to mind, partly because of the ‘phil’ contained in the name, and partly because of an
obscure pun (‘Astro’ means ‘star’, punning on the ‘Sid’ of Sidney – similar to the Latin sidus,
‘star’). So Sidney clearly did ‘look into [his] heart’ before he wrote.
This opening sonnet sees Sidney introducing – and, indeed, inducing – the sonnet sequence as a
whole. (Compare the first sonnet in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which is somewhat less
‘introductory’ in nature.) In summary, he acknowledges that he truly loves the woman he is to
write about, and wants to convey that through the poetry he writes, so that his pain – in being
transmuted into great verse – will please the woman he loves. This will have the knock-on effect
of making her want to read on, and through reading on she will come to know how deeply he
loves her, and when she realises this she will pity him, and thus he will win her ‘grace’ or
attention and blessing. So far, so courtly love: that medieval tradition in poetry whereby the
hopeless lover admires the woman from afar, and wishes to please her by praising her beauty in
poetry, through immortalising her in verse. (Later on in the sonnet sequence, Sidney will critique
this idea and give it a Renaissance twist.)

But Sidney says that he made the mistake of studying other writers’ words and trying to emulate
them in order ‘to paint the blackest face of woe’. Sidney then creates a somewhat unusual
‘family’ whereby Invention (i.e. the poet’s creativity) is the child of Nature (Mother Nature, of
course), but Invention is being governed here not by his natural mother, Nature, but by his
stepmother or ‘step-dame’, Study. And study is not the best way to beget invention – not if the
words one invents are to ring true. What’s more, through copying what others have written,
Sidney finds other writers hinder rather than help him, because – to use the old line – it’s all been
said before. And because of that, his words will ring hollow and his beloved won’t believe them.

Sidney then returns to the mothering analogy, and likens himself to a woman ‘great with child’ –
(so) to speak. Suffering the pangs or ‘throes’ of childbirth, he bites his pen and beats himself for
not being able to write, and then – his Muse speaks, chiding him for a fool, and commanding him
to look in his heart and start writing. Forget books, forget study: just be true to yourself. Look
inside and write what you find there. (‘Heart’ in Sidney’s time wasn’t simply used to refer to
romantic emotion; there was no strict divide made between the brain and the heart. So ‘look in
thy heart’ isn’t a foolishly romantic command: it also means ‘examine your thoughts’.)

Thus, in a neat opening sonnet, Sidney declares that what follows will be ‘from the heart’. This is
also a convention of courtly love, but Sidney is already giving it a twist. In terms of the form he
employs, careful analysis reveals that Sidney innovates right from the start, in deploying twelve-
syllable lines (known as ‘alexandrines’) rather than the conventional ten-syllable lines typically
found in a sonnet.
Continue to explore Sidney’s remarkable sonnet sequence with our analysis of another classic
sonnet from Astrophil and Stella, ‘With how sad steps, O moon …’ For another classic poem
about poetic inspiration, you can read our analysis of Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought-Fox’. For
more Elizabethan sonnets, see our series analysing Shakespeare’s Sonnets. For more classic
Tudor poetry, check out our pick of the best Renaissance poems in English.

Sonnet 1.

Astrophel and Stella

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Probably composed in the 1580s, Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella is an English sonnet
sequence containing 108 sonnets and 11 songs. The name derives from the two Greek words,
'aster' (star) and 'phil' (lover), and the Latin word 'stella' meaning star. Thus Astrophil is the star
lover, and Stella is his star. Sidney partly nativized the key features of his Italian model Petrarch,
including an ongoing but partly obscure narrative, the philosophical trappings of the poet in
relation to love and desire, and musings on the art of poetic creation. Sidney also adopts the
Petrarchan rhyme scheme, though he uses it with such freedom that fifteen variants are
employed.[1]
Some have suggested that the love represented within the sequence may be a literal one as
Sidney evidently connects Astrophil to himself and Stella to Lady Penelope Devereux, afterward
Lady Rich. Sidney and Lady Penelope had been betrothed when the latter was a child. For some
reason the match was broken off, and Lady Penelope married Lord Rich, with whom she lived
for a while most unhappily. She is thought to be the Penelope Rich, the wife of Robert Rich, 3rd
Baronet. Payne and Hunter suggest that modern criticism, though not explicitly rejecting this
connection, leans more towards the viewpoint that writers happily create a poetic persona,
artificial and distinct from themselves

Publishing history[edit]
Many of the poems were circulated in manuscript form before the first edition was printed by
Thomas Newman in 1591, five years after Sidney's death. This edition included ten of Sidney's
songs, a preface by Thomas Nashe and verses from other poets including Thomas
Campion, Samuel Daniel and the Earl of Oxford.[3] The text was allegedly copied down by a man
in the employ of one of Sidney's associates, thus it was full of errors and misreadings that
eventually led to Sidney's friends ensuring that the unsold copies were impounded.[4] Newman
printed a second version later in the year, and though the text was more accurate it was still
flawed. The version of Astrophil and Stella commonly used is found in the folio of the 1598
version of Sidney's Arcadia. Though still not completely free from error, this was prepared under
the supervision of his sister the Countess of Pembroke and is considered the most authoritative
text available.[3] All known versions of Astrophil and Stella have the poems in the same order,
making it almost certain that Sidney determined their sequence.

Astrophel vs. Astrophil[edit]

The Oxford University Press collection of Sidney's major works has this to say about the title:
There is no evidence that the title is authorial. It derives from the first printed text, the
unauthorized quarto edition published by Thomas Newman (1591). Newman may also have been
responsible for the consistent practice in early printings of calling the lover persona 'Astrophel'.
Ringler emended to 'Astrophil' on the grounds of etymological correctness, since the name is
presumably based on Greek aster philein, and means 'lover of a star' (with stella meaning 'star');
the 'phil' element alluding also, no doubt, to Sidney's Christian name