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Caelica Analysis

Decent Essays

Fulke Greville the author of “Caelica,” survived most of his contemporaries. Since his childhood, Greville has a sense of his own great worth. His active literary life was almost fifty years from the late 1570’s to the 1620’s, which makes him the principal courtly writer of the Elizabeth and Jacobean eras. When Greville wrote, he would prefer the English form to the Italian.
The main interest in Greville has been focused not on his closet dramas such as his sonnet sequence “Caelica,” but on his relationship with the Sidney circle. Sonnets 1 through 76 of “Caelica” appear to be written after 1577, when Greville and his two other friends were experimenting with verse forms. The rivalry between Sidney and Greville was friendly and the titles of their sonnet sequence gave the reveal of this rivalry. Sidney’s mistress is a single star (Stella); Greville addresses his poems to the entire sky (Caelica). “Caelica is more of a miscellany of predominantly short, often introspective poems in which no fewer than three mistresses are named: Caelica, Myra, and Cynthia” (Gouws).
Sidney’s death has a huge impact on Greville, as he stopped writing poems on the human love and the “Caelica” sonnets 77-81 turned to remember Sidney for this preoccupied him from mourning. In 1599, the poems began o show a preference for the six-line stanza and that soon became his form of writing these poems. Fulke Greville’s “Caelica” relates to both the tradition of love poetry and the reformed discourses of repentance and salvation. The piece suggests that “Caelica” identifies a role for sinfully desirous aspects of the self even within the twin processes of repentance and conversion. The speaker struggles to articulate an emerging, repentant disposition, and serves in the final movement of the sequence. When comparing “Caelica” to other poems, “Caelica” offers an approach to reform repentance that understands it to be concerned both with individual and communal redemption. The lover of Fulke Greville’s “Caelica” attends to the “election” as a simultaneously theological and astrological term. Greville’s “amatory” points to a pressing astrological debate of his time.
In “Caelica” sonnet 86, it advocates patience in the face of life and the

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