Advertisement
UK markets closed
  • NIKKEI 225

    40,168.07
    -594.66 (-1.46%)
     
  • HANG SENG

    16,541.42
    +148.58 (+0.91%)
     
  • CRUDE OIL

    82.99
    +1.64 (+2.02%)
     
  • GOLD FUTURES

    2,241.10
    +28.40 (+1.28%)
     
  • DOW

    39,807.37
    +47.29 (+0.12%)
     
  • Bitcoin GBP

    56,076.36
    +1,508.79 (+2.76%)
     
  • CMC Crypto 200

    885.54
    0.00 (0.00%)
     
  • NASDAQ Composite

    16,379.46
    -20.06 (-0.12%)
     
  • UK FTSE All Share

    4,338.05
    +12.12 (+0.28%)
     

Poem of the week: from Astrophil and Stella by Philip Sidney

Sonnet LXIII

O grammar-rules, O now your virtues show;
So children still read you with awful eyes,
As my young dove may, in your precepts wise,
Her grant to me by her own virtue know;
For late, with heart most high, with eyes most low,
I craved the thing which ever she denies;
She, lightning Love displaying Venus’ skies,
Lest once should not be heard, twice said, No, No!
Sing then, my muse, now Io Pæan sing;
Heav’ns envy not at my high triumphing,
But grammar’s force with sweet success confirm;
For Grammar says (O this dear Stella weigh,)
For Grammar says (to Grammar who says nay)
That in one speech two negatives affirm!

This week we’re making a return visit to Philip Sidney’s brilliant and seminal sonnet-sequence, Astrophil and Stella. Sonnet XXXI, With how sad steps, O Moone, was a Poem of the week in 2012. A mournful and introspective lyric, one of the most popular in the sequence, it suggests sincerity, seeming to show Sidney following his earliest instruction from Parnassus: “Fool, said my Muse to me, Look in thy heart and write.”

This week’s choice, Sonnet LXIII, is a lot more playful. Another intention Sidney declared early on in the sequence was to employ “the remnants of my wit / To make myself believe that all is well, / While, with a feeling skill, I paint my hell”. The emphasis is on “wit” rather than “hell” in Sonnet LXIII. This doesn’t cancel out all “feeling skill”, but endless lament would make dull reading, and Astrophil and Stella is meant to be read, perhaps not only by its romantic recipient (probably Penelope Devereux) but by Sidney’s fellow poets and courtiers. It’s something of a variety show, and always a conscious display of poetic skill.

ADVERTISEMENT

Sidney springs an immediate surprise by initially addressing the poem to “grammar-rules”. He adds a quick cartoon of the young scholars attending the lesson, their eyes “awful” – ie full of awe. The poet’s mistress, as a virtuous “young dove”, is well acquainted with the rules, and will have to concede the poet’s claim that she has granted him a wish. This is still in the narrative future. In the meantime, sexual innuendo is a quickly lit charge: we won’t be fooled for long that this sonnet is a mere work of grammar nerdery. Astrophil’s own eyes, also, no doubt, “awful”, are “most low” while the lower part he designates his heart is “most high”.

“Stella” had earlier seen what was coming, thanks to “Lightning Love displaying Venus’s skies” and now her mistake is revealed. In protesting twice against the lover’s well-advertised approach she has exclaimed “No, No!”– a double negative. So there is a “yes”, according to the precept “That in one speech two negatives affirm!” Of course, our grammarian-poet is wrong: the rule doesn’t apply to the emphatic use of the negative. That thanksgiving victory hymn to Io demanded by the poet from his Muse in line nine is premature. But it gives a little additional puff to the hyperbole, and the implicit self-mockery.

Sidney’s rhyme scheme is innovative: notice the unusually placed rhyming couplet of lines nine and 10. The sequence includes other variants on the Petrarchan rhyme scheme, songs as well as sonnets and sonnets in hexameter as well as pentameter. In 1582 or thereabouts the formal sonnet sequence is still at an early stage, and Sidney is not simply looking into his heart and exercising his wit: he is experimenting with the possibilities of an exciting new form. Sonnet LXIII conveys some of the sheer delight of confident technical mastery.