Sonnet 6: Some Lovers Speak
Some lovers speak when they their Muses entertain,
Of hopes begot by fear, of wot not what desires:
Of force of heav'nly beams, infusing hellish pain:
Of living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms, and freezing fires.
Some one his song in Jove, and Jove's strange tales attires,
Broidered with bulls and swans, powdered with golden rain;
Another humbler wit to shepherd's pipe retires,
Yet hiding royal blood full oft in rural vein.
To some a sweetest plaint a sweetest style affords,
While tears pour out his ink, and sighs breathe out his words:
His paper pale despair, and pain his pen doth move.
I can speak what I feel, and feel as much as they,
But think that all the map of my state I display,
When trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love.
Sonnet 6 continues the winter imagery from the previous sonnet and furthers the procreation theme. Winter,
symbolizing old age, and summer, symbolizing youth, are diametrically opposed.
The poet begs the young man not to die childless — "ere thou be distill'd" — without first making "sweet
some vial." Here, "distill'd" recalls the summer flowers from Sonnet 5; "vial," referring to the bottle in which
perfume is kept, is an image for a woman whom the young man will sexually love, but "vial" can also refer
to the child of that sexual union. Ten children, the poet declares, will generate ten times the image of their
father and ten times the happiness of only one child.
The poet strongly condemns the young man's narcissism in this sonnet by linking it with death. "Self-killed"
refers both to the youth's hoarding his beauty by not passing it on to a child, and to his inevitably dying
alone if he continues his narcissistic behavior. The poet argues that procreation ensures life after death;
losing your identity in death does not necessarily mean the loss of life so long as you have procreated. Lines
5 and 6 make this concept clear: "That use is not forbidden usury / Which happies those that pay the willing
loan." Once you recognize the wealth of beauty by loving another person, you must use this knowledge of
love if it is to increase and not decay.
Sonnet 6 is notable for the ingenious multiplying of conceits and especially for the concluding pun on a legal
will in the final couplet: "Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair / To be death's conquest and make
worms thine heir." Here, as earlier in the sonnet, the poet juxtaposes the themes of narcissism and death.
"Self-willed" echoes line 4's "self-killed," and the worms that destroy the young man's dead body will be his
only heirs should he die without begetting a child.
Titles are important when considering any text but are of particular importance when considering
poetry. Stella is from the Latin word for star and Astrophel is derived from two Greek words: astro which
means star and phil which means lover. Astrophel and Stella VI is part of a sequence of sonnets. A typical
sonnet sequence has many conventions. Opening and closing sonnets will usually inform the remainder of
the sequence. These sonnets tell the story of a developing relationship between two lovers, the sonnets focus
on changing emotions of the speaker. The sonnet is fourteen lines long, there are two basic forms eight lines
followed by six with a
volta on line nine or, as in the instant case, four quatrains followed by a couplet that contains the twist.
The first sonnet in the sequence describes how the poet is struggling to find words to describe his
love, how he cannot study the writing of others to find inspiration in the same way that Shakespeare did. In
sonnet VI he returns to this theme and describes why he cannot copy other authors and poets. Iambic
hexameter is utilised throughout the sonnet
Sidney was particular in his use of metrics, but the use of rhyme is not conventional. There are no
polysyllabic rhymes and each line is end-stopped. The meter and unconventional rhyme scheme emphasize
the narrator’s meaning that Astrophel is a unique poet who follows no formal patterns or rules of
convention. The language is rich, and full of imagery, held together by the accurate use of the meter. . In
lines 1 to 11 he effectively provides a list of various conventions traditionally used when writing sonnets.
In some sonnets the message is that love is a force which can overpower us and will make us suffer. The use
of oxymorons (a term that is self-contradictory) is almost obligatory, he points this out vividly, and utilises
the convention, when he refers to: “living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms and freezing fires”. The use
mythology within sonnets of the period is also discussed in the poem and again the convention is adopted
when
Sidney refers to the various disguises used by Jove or Zeus to get to the women he wanted:
“Someone his song in Jove, and Jove’s strange tales, attires, Broidered with bulls and swans, powdered with
golden rain;” He refers to how some poets of the time and classical poets would use references to a pastoral
tradition, in which ladies and gentlemen masquerade as shepherds:“Another, humbler, wit to shepherd’s pipe
retires, Yet hiding royal blood full oft in rural vein”Incorporating the device of the “conceit” or comparisons
to describe the act of writing the sonnets is utilised and described when he writes how:“…tears pour out his
ink, and sighs breathe out his words:” The twist in the sonnet is contained in the couplet at the end of the
sonnet when he describes how he can say what he feels and how he loves as well as any of them without the
use of such rigid formulae when he says that all he to do is to softly say in a trembling voice “that I do Stella
love”. Structurally, in sonnet VI of Astrophel and Stella, the lines are full of images of opposites, and
contrasts such as pastoral imagery being next to images of violence and pain. Astrophel, the narrator, argues
that poets, with all of their technical rules for the use of language in a sonnet, are restricted and repressed in
the manner in which they are permitted to express themselves because of this strict adherence to a body of
rules. Whilst he amply demonstrates his skills in the use of these conventions he is nonetheless being critical
of them and essentially saying that he can be poetic with the best of them, but his love is so powerful that
words and expressions cannot describe adequately his love for Stella; he is only able to feel, sense and think
about it. In the second poem the title provides the reader with a clue that the lover to be discussed is
untouchable or unreachable in some way. Shirley strictly adheres to the convention of iambic pentameter in
the form of the poem and utilises rhyme throughout it. In the same way that Astrophel, as the narrator in
Astrophel and Stella VI is discussing and describing the love he has for a woman, so in this piece the
narrator is describing his love for a woman. The difference is that he woman does not appear to exist. The
theme is that of the unknown or unknowable mistress. Given the uniqueness of the topic is is a challenging
subject for the renaissance poet. The poem opens with moving lines that describe the frustration of the
narrator in his desire to love and to speak to his lover. It provides an image of pent up frustration. The poem
goes on to describe how much he would be able to love this idealized beauty. (Richmond H. M. 1959). The
poem however, in dealing with a non existent lover may be described as dealing with the frustrating
evanescence of some idealized sexual fantasy; love is seen as being distinct from a corporeal body and able
to exist independently. The use of references to the senses which are themselves intangible lends weight to
this image. By its nature, because the poem is dealing in what would be a paradigm of feminine beauty and
grace, but which does not exist, it dwells more upon the egocentric, introspective thought processes and
emotions of the writer, a man, rather than those of the subject matter, a woman. Utilising this particular
lyrical renaissance device and in adhering to strict conventions of rhyme and meter and structure the narrator
is reducing women in general to the status of desirable object that will be able to satisfy the sexual
frustration of a lonely man. The view that women were mere chattels was reinforced with legal precedent at
the time of writing. (Norbrook D., 1984). The strict adherence to rules of writing by Shirley would strongly
suggest his belief in that particular rule set. In contrast
Sidney is challenging the standardised format, in his discussion of love, which would tend to suggest that he
is challenging the status quo. He uses poetic structure as metaphors for the way in which women must abide
by man made rules and is saying that even without these rules, which by implication he disagrees with, he is
simply in love.
Astrophil and Stella 20: Fly, fly, my friends, I have
my death wound, fly
By Sir Philip Sidney
Fly, fly, my friends, I have my death wound, fly!
See there that boy, that murd'ring boy, I say,
Who, like a thief, hid in dark bush doth lie
Till bloody bullet get him wrongful prey.
So tyrant he no fitter place could spy,
Nor so fair level in so secret stay,
As that sweet black which veils the heav'nly eye;
There himself with his shot he close doth lay.
Poor passenger, pass now thereby I did,
And stay'd, pleas'd with the prospect of the place,
While that black hue from me the bad guest hid;
But straight I saw motions of lightning grace
And then descried the glist'ring of his dart:
But ere I could fly thence it pierc'd my heart
1. Run, comrades, run: I am fatally wounded, run!
2. Look at that boy over there, I mean, that killer
3. who like a highwayman lies hidden in thick undergrowth
4. until his slaughtering ammunition obtains him an
ill-gotten gain.
5. So that was it: he, the tyrant, could not see a more
suitable place
6. or as good an aiming-point in as well concealed a lair
7. as the dear darkness that covers the eyes of my beloved,
8. and so there he lay hidden with his firearm.
9. I, an unlucky passer-by, just passed there
10. and stopped a moment, liking the view
11. as long as that darkness hid the malice it harboured:
12. but immediately I noticed a movement, graceful but fast,
13. and then I made out the gleam of his arrow
14. but before I could run away, I was shot to the heart.
In this crucial, sensual sonnet, the young man becomes the "master-mistress" of the poet's passion. The
young man's double nature and character, however, present a problem of description: Although to the poet
he possesses a woman's gentleness and charm, the youth bears the genitalia ("one thing") of a man, and
despite having a woman's physical attractiveness, the young man has none of a woman's fickle and
flirtatious character — a condescending view of women, if not flat out misogynistic.
The youth's double sexuality, as portrayed by the poet, accentuates the youth's challenge for the poet. As a
man with the beauty of a woman, the youth is designed to be partnered with women but attracts men as well,
being unsurpassed in looks and more faithful than any woman.
Sonnet 20 is the first sonnet not concerned in one way or another with the defeat of time or with the young
man's fathering a child. Rather, the poet's interest is in discovering the nature of their relationship. Yet even
as the poet acknowledges an erotic attraction to the youth, he does not entertain the possibility of a physical
consummation of his love.
Of all the sonnets, Sonnet 20 stirs the most critical controversy, particularly among those critics who read
the sonnets as autobiography. But the issue here is not what could have happened, but what the poet's
feelings are. Ambiguity characterizes his feelings but not his language. The poet does not want to possess
the youth physically. But the sonnet is the first one to evoke bawdiness. The poet "fell a-doting" and waxes
in a dreamlike repine of his creation until, in the last line, the dreamer wakes to the youth's true sexual
reality: "Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure." We are assured then that the relation of poet to
youth is based on love rather than sex; according to some critics, even if the possibility existed that the poet
could have a sexual relationship with the young man, he doesn't show that he would be tempted. Other
critics, of course, disagree with this interpretation.
