Reader Response to Sydney's Sonnets, Astrophil and Stella Essay

“On Being Cautioned against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because it was Frequented by a Lunatic,” Charlotte Smith’s sonnet, comments on the poet’s feelings toward this lunatic and the thought process he instigates in her mind. By using different syntax to describe her two characters, Smith draws the attention of the reader to the message in the sonnet instead of the scene on the surface. The structure of the English sonnet also lends to the poem’s power, giving Smith a perfect avenue to deliver her message.

This sonnet serves to invoke a strong sense of realism in love, arguing that as strong an intensity of emotion as may be held, may be held, without the need for delusions of grandeur, taking the view that trying to reconcile two essentially different and diverse things as equal is to do true justice to neither. The beloved in this case thus represents more the need for a character developed to challenge stereotype than an actual real-life woman,

In the sonnet, the speaker tends to focus on the negative aspects of women when describing the youth’s beauty. For example, the speaker says, “A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted”

[Line 2]* - Compare the line to Macbeth (5.3.23) "my way of life/is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf".

Sir Phillip Sidney's Sonnet # 47 from Astrophil and Stella The sonnet is a short concise form of writing and it takes a great mind to master it. By mastering it, I mean to be able to say so much in what seems like so little space. Sir Phillip Sidney comes as close to mastering it as anyone else in his time or any other does. As the opening line says, this is about a betrayal. Strangely enough, the last line of the sonnet ends with a word that is the very essence of betrayal. The sonnet ends with the word, lie. This would cause one to expect to get an explanation of the betrayal between the first and last lines. This appears to be a story of both love and betrayal. In the

At first glance, it’s dark and callous, while showing the speaker apparently in contradictory minds about his lover. The recipient of this prickly sonnet was not the archetypal blond, pale and rosy-cheeked beauty that was so fashionable in court, but rather the opposite. Not to say, the former is not beauty, but by today’s prism opinions she’s likely on par amongst the vast multihued acceptance.

Both are incredible poets that certainly stand out in their own way, Sir Philip Sidney and John Donne have made literature history through fully baring their souls to the world in simple lyrics. Sidney’ Astrophil and Stella and Donne’s Songs and Sonnets are both mainly concerned with love. While Sidney and Donne though have similar concepts, their approaches are completely distinctive.

Similar to people in each period, literature is defined by its era. Likewise, critical literary periods influence motifs such as love and therefore are expressed differently over centuries. Within literature, love is expressed differently in the sixteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is evident in“Since brass, nor stone, nor boundless sea” by William Shakespeare,John Fletcher's,“Take oh ,take those lips away' written in the Renaissance of the Elizabethan period,“Life in A Love” by Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy's “Broken Appointment” from the Romantic period and“To My Valentine” by Ogden Nash and Langston Hughes' “Love Again Blues” written in the Modern period . Each poem of different periods succumb to exterior influences in society and therefore projects love in distinct ways. The

He enlarged the function of the sonnet to political and moral criticism and this has been followed by later poets.  Finally the sonnet came to be used for any subject which a short, concentrated lyric would afford to evolve. Hence, we have Wordsworth’s  ‘Composed Upon Westminister Bridge’, Keat’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, Shelley’s ‘England in 1819’,  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’  and so many memorable sonnets by so many famous poets. Longfellow, Jones Very, G. H. Boker, and E. A. Robinson are generally appreciated for writing some of the best sonnets in America. William Ellery Leonard, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and W. H. Auden have done distinguished work in the sonnet and the sonnet sequence in this century.Already, the sonnet form has taken a unique position in the literary field. But the question inevitably comes is that why has it proved so popular? Perhaps ,though minute in extent, it has immense elasticity: it can have room for story elements; it can stage a brief dramatic scene; it can present a series of philosophical reflections; it can survey a vast variety of reflections, understandings and moods within a tightly organized

To write a sonnet sequence then, about life and loves in California is really to form a sub-text which clearly states that the ‘intention’ of the narrative is to present a range of the diverse and possible kinds of loves, which are possible and acceptable in a ‘modern’ metropolis. Seth’s sonnet sequence is compared with Shakespeare’s sonnets in the style and form it takes.

Edmund Spenser’s Sonnet 75 from Amorreti is not only an exquisite piece of Elizabethan times, it portrays the quintessential poetry of the time as well. His optimal employment of literary techniques of form, rhyme, imagery, personification and alliteration give the sonnet a wholesome structure and an pleasant quality.

“Carrion Comfort,” one of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s Terrible Sonnets, expresses a sentiment atypical of Hopkins’s usually ecstatically worshipful poems. Hopkins was deeply religious, and much of his poetry invoked a euphoric, worshipful experience of the natural world and its connection to God. Toward the end of his career and his life, however, Hopkins wrote his Terrible Sonnets, which dealt with darker emotions and internal conflict; “Carrion Comfort” is one such sonnet. The original sonnet structure is preserved, for the most part, in its rhyme scheme as well as the traditional tonal shift at the end of the octavo. However, Hopkins separated the octavo into two quatrains and discarded the iambic pentameter. This dismissal of certain rules

The two main group of sonnets (1-126 and 127-154) discover a number of parallels, some of which are merely conventional and commonplace. In two of the sonnets (46 &

Sonnet 31, the sonnet I will be mainly discussing in this essay, is undeniably the most famous of Sidney’s sonnets. This sonnet utilises Sidney’s favourite Italian rhyme scheme – ABBA CDCD EE, paired with his preferred Italian sonnet style, including an octave, followed by a sestet, and a turn in line 8. This writing style not native to the English Language displays Sidney’s mastery in conveying his emotional anguish – a skill which elevates him as a loved and dearly missed poet of the Elizabethan era. The poem employs iambic pentameter, showing Sidney’s marriage of typically English meter with a continental writing style, which creates a beautifully complex narrative of a pining love. The strict meter creates a steady and somewhat lyrical rhyme scheme, which adds a romantic essence of sound to the sonnet, almost as if Astrophil is attempting to serenade Stella throughout the collection of poetry, unfortunately, to no avail.

Sir Philip Sidney argued for the positive value of imaginative literature in The Defence of Poesy, in which he claimed that literature should ‘teach and delight’. The influence of Sidney’s claim can be seen in John Skelton’s work ‘The Bowge of Courte’ and Thomas Nashe’s ‘The Choise of Valentines’. Skelton’s ‘The Bowge of Court’, has been described as ‘a fifteenth-century dream vision built on the model of the morality play’ and ‘The Choise of Valentines’ as ‘an Ovidian erotic poem’, which elaborates ‘a tale of impotence and erotic substitution.’ While both poems are rich in their differences, due to the satiric and erotic genres, they share the similarity of belonging to a very specific time. By examining the origins d interpreting Sidney’s presentation of the phrase ‘teach and delight’, the ways in which Skelton and Nashe’s texts maintain Sidney’s claim can be discussed. Skelton teaches through ‘The Bowge of Court’, by employing allegory as a way to critique the court, and uses satire as a form of poetic council. Nashe teaches in ‘The Choise of Valentines’ by presenting his text and an example of originality and satirising the idea of performance. Skelton delights in his text by using the symbol of the ship as an ornament added to the truth of the poem. Nashe delights in his text by the freshness of language used and the originality of his poetry.