Astrophil and Stella – Sonnet IX

 

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Sonnet IX from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella

Queen Virtue’s court, which some call Stella’s face,
Prepar’d by Nature’s choicest furniture,
Hath his front built of alabaster pure;
Gold is the covering of that stately place.
The door by which sometimes comes forth her Grace
Red porphyr is, which lock of pearl makes sure,
Whose porches rich (which name of cheeks endure)
Marble mix’d red and white do interlace.
The windows now through which this heav’nly guest
Looks o’er the world, and can find nothing such,
Which dare claim from those lights the name of best,
Of touch they are that without touch doth touch,
Which Cupid’s self from Beauty’s mine did draw:
Of touch they are, and poor I am their straw.



Analysis

What is Said

  • Sonnet IX’s primary function is to allow the reader to finally “see” Stella. Up to this point, the reader has been told several times over just how beautiful she is, but with the exceptions of her skin and eyes, has no information on just what makes her so. In his description, Sidney singles out each part of Stella’s face in separate praise, but with a twist: for all of this he does under the conceit that Stella is actually a building, namely “Queen Virtue’s court” (1), implying of course that Astrophil sees truth or “virtue” when he gazes upon his lover. Each facial feature is represented as a different part of this building, with her white forehead being the alabaster façade, her flushed cheeks porches of red and white marble, her teeth a “lock of pearl,” and her golden hair the roof (3-9). Her red lips, which traditionally would have been coral (or something similar), serve as a door built from porphyry, while her “beamy black” eyes form the windows (VII, 3). In the final couplet of the sonnet, Astrophil laments the fact that he is a slave to this face—those eyes, more specifically—crafted expertly by Cupid, himself, who used perfect, heavenly beauty as his blueprint.


How it’s Said

  • Sidney certainly says a great deal about Stella’s appearance in the fourteen lines that comprise Sonnet IX, but he says quite a bit more about the effect of that beauty on Astrophil in the way that he divides them. The first two lines are merely expository ones, priming the reader’s imagination for the conceit that follows. After that, everything up until the couplet engages in the “building” of Stella. Sidney spends exactly one line each on Stella’s “front” and “covering” (or forehead and hair). The language is tight, and the metaphors stated explicitly. As he moves onto her mouth and cheeks, the language loosens a bit; now he involves dependent clauses and parenthetical interruptions that welcome further detail to their corresponding parts of the building. These features occupy not just one line each, but two. Lastly, he arrives at Stella’s eyes (so dazzling that he has already dedicated an entire sonnet to them . . . ). Yet to these “windows,” Sidney devotes not one, not two, but four entire lines of the sonnet. Taken all together, there is a perceptible decline in self-control; it seems as though the poet himself is getting carried away by Stella’s beauty simply in describing it. With each feature, his grip loosens just a little bit more, until he’s plunged into lovesick agitation upon arriving at Stella’s eyes (whose command over him he hasn’t exactly made secret, as evidenced in Sonnet VII). The strong sensation of desire builds throughout the three quatrains, but falls with its pathetic culmination in the couplet. The tension created by the conflict between longing and self-control is punctured when Astrophil gives in, declaring himself—”poor I”—slave to Stella’s eyes.


How it Sounds

  • Elizabethan sonnets were traditionally composed in rhymed iambic pentameter, and Sidney’s were no different. Composing in the Petrarchan style of sonnet with a rhyme scheme of ABBA/ABBA/CDCD/EE, the musicality of Sonnet IX complements the structural division of it. The first two quatrains are complete sentences, and with the ABBA rhyme scheme that “hugs” their contents by beginning and ending with the same sound, they provide a comfortable sense of unity. However, changes occur when Sidney arrives at Stella’s eyes in the third quatrain. The sense of unity and completeness is missing; he introduces a new rhyme and a new rhyme scheme in CDCD. It’s not hugged together, it’s not an independent sentence, and the now familiar A and B words have been supplanted. Very subtly, the musical composition of this poem introduces a muted frenzy just as Astrophil seems to lose his self-control. Here, Sidney expertly manipulates a highly standardized poetic form on the mechanical, syllabic level, engendering a unique poetic sound o accentuate his meaning.




Historical Significance

Lady Penelope & the Baron Robert Rich

  • In line seven, Sidney makes a sly reference to the assumed original Stella: his would-have-been wife, Penelope Devereux. The two met when Sidney accompanied Queen Elizabeth to Essex, where Penelope’s father was Earl. It was her father’s dying wish that they marry, but all plans of a union between the two were dashed when his widow Lettice married the Earl of Leicester and Sidney’s uncle, Robert Dudley. Penelope was presented to the court without immediate prospects, and was snatched up within a few months by the Baron Robert Rich. Sidney writes parenthetically that Stella’s cheeks “endure” the adjective “rich” with strong but subtle scorn. With the English court being as small and socially insulated as it was, nearly all within it would have been receptive to such a direct allusion to one of their peers. While there’s little in the way of significant, real-world meaning behind this derisive line, it demonstrates the tight author-audience relationship that was founded on a common social habitat. Sidney, whose work was meant for the eyes of court members, knew that his fellow gentlemen and women were aware of his prevented engagement to Penelope—and, of course, her subsequent marriage to Robert Rich. For the exclusivity of the Elizabethan court provided for such tightly enclosed social circles in which information traveled both freely and fast. To a twenty-first-century reader, Sidney’s involvement of his personal life may come as a surprise, but the specificity of this reference equips that reader with a firm understanding of the social proximity Sidney had to the audience for whom he wrote.


Materials

  • Perfume Vessel of Tutankhamun.jpg
    Alabaster vessel found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, dated ca. 1332 BCE. As if alabaster weren’t expensive enough, this ornate artifact was crafted to hold the pharaoh’s perfume.

    In a similar manner, the gently nuanced materials that Sidney uses to “build” his image of Stella outline the social and economic prosperity of the class to which he was constantly appealing. With lips as red as porphyry, skin as white as

    Tetrarchs.jpg
    “Tetrarchs,” dated ca. 4th century CE. Sculpted from porphyry in the Byzantine Empire.

    alabaster (marbleized with a healthy flush) and eyes as black as “touch,” the ideal Renaissance beauty emerges from the text through agents of colorful detail. But the function of these minerals does more than superficially sketch Stella’s features and demonstrate the author’s creativity. All five (porphyry, alabaster, marble, pearl and the difficult to define “touch”) date back through history and literature as expensive, ornamental materials, carrying with them connotations of opulence suited for noble extravagance or religious worship. Porphyry was commonly used by the Romans to craft decorative urns, while pearl, alabaster and marble have been symbols of luxury since over a thousand years before the common era. While the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Oxford English Dictionary equate it with a number of different valuable materials, “touch” very likely means the semi-precious mineral, jet (which, when rubbed, produces a faint static electric charge that attracts light objects, such as “straw” [14]). Thus, Sidney’s recreation of his Stella transcends physical description, attaching a quality of preciousness to it that bespeaks how greatly she is cherished. These materials, pregnant with cultural significance, are able to say more about Stella’s beauty in fourteen lines than a paragraph could do.

Petrarchan Themes

  • Sidney demonstrates a rich familiarity with the Petrarchan conventions that were so eagerly embraced by his fellow artists. These themes were introduced to literature through Troubadour poetry and later adopted by Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), whose work they would come to define. Through their constant invocation, these images became popularized, permeating the cultural conceptions of love and beauty. To the right is a collection of Petrarch’s sonnets, as well as sonnets from Sidney’s contemporaries and other art forms that demonstrate the widespread use of these conventions. By employing them, Sidney connects with his audience through their shared knowledge of them, inviting the cultural connotations that had evolved from them to supply meaning of their own to his work. In this sonnet, for instance, he invokes Cupid—the classical god of

    love (whom Petrarch held accountable for the intense passion he felt for his own muse, Laura)—as the chief architect of Stella’s physical appearance. In Sonnet VI, he directly identifies the most popular Petrarchan paradoxes: “living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms, and freezing fires” (4). And, as seen here in Sonnet IX, Sidney’s physical description of Stella is the perfect embodiment of classical, Laura-inspired beauty: translucent ivory skin, golden tresses, white teeth, red lips and a youthful flush commemorate the Petrarchan ideal. Sidney incorporates these universally recognized tropes as literary anchors in his work—a means of identifying with his culture and communicating with its members through historically relevant terms.


Break From Petrarchan Convention

  • And yet, Sidney very frequently uses these “anchors” of convention as literary tools for establishing his own unconventionality. He connects to his audience through them, but it is perhaps in his subsequent rejection of them that he most clearly communicates with it. Returning to Sonnet VI and the

    Penelope Devereux.jpg
    Artist unknown, ca. 1581. Dorothy (left) and Penelope (right) Devereux.

    list of Petrarchan themes, when taken with the rest of the poem, these seem less like actual invocation and more like a pithy inventory of tired clichés: “Some lovers speak, when they their muses entertain, / . . . / Of living deaths, dear, wounds, fair storms, and freezing fires.” There is an implicit sense of distance in the identification of these poets as “some lovers,” as though Sidney wishes not to be associated with them. He provides two more examples of commonplaces that “some lovers” rely on when writing in love’s despair before boldly declaring, “I can speak what I feel, and feel as much as they, / But think that all the map of my state I display” (12-13, emphasis mine). In other words, Sidney boasts (through the guise of the character of Astrophil) that he, unlike “some lovers,” can convey his lovesickness objectively. While there are numerous citable instances of Sidney embracing Petrarchan images, such as his reference to Cupid in this sonnet (Sonnet IX), he makes a distinct effort to separate himself from convention, thus asserting his creative individuality. Even in this sonnet, where his words paint Stella after the Petrarchan model, Sidney cleverly distinguishes himself from custom by “building” Stella as though he were building a house. Much like Penelope Devereux, Stella fits the Petrarchan model perfectly in every category but her strikingly dark eyes—or “windows”—contrasted with Laura’s “vivid blue orbs” (9; Petrarch, Canzoniere, Sonnet CLIX, ). Pictured here, Penelope was considered by many to be one of the most beautiful ladies at court in her youth, and no doubt her uncanny semblance to the idealized Stella constitutes one of the many reasons scholars believe her to have been Sidney’s muse.


Platonic Elements

  • It would seem as though Sidney’s hand were guided by Platonic philosophy throughout his composition of Astrophil and Stella. In Sonnet IV, Astrophil describes the power of Stella’s physical beauty: “I swear, my heart such one shall show to thee / That shrines in flesh so true a deity, / That Virtue, thou thyself shalt be in love” (12-14). Here, Sidney reverses a central theme in Platonic philosophy by suggesting that perfect virtue is to fall victim to Stella’s physical allure. Platonism, of course, stems from the belief that the physical world does not reflect the truth, that there is a world of ideas or “forms,” and that this one is “but a shade” of it (Sonnet V, 10). Thus, for Stella’s body to incarnate “so true a deity” implies that she is more than ashadow of the world of forms, but a form herself. To say that virtue, mankind’s only access to spiritual perfection and truth, must succumb to the the physical picture of Stella is the highest possible

  • compliment that physical beauty could receive. In this sonnet (Sonnet IX), Sidney seems to toy with Platonism once again. The couplet at the end of the sonnetcharges Cupid with Stella’s physical construction, asserting that Stella’s eyes “Cupid’s self from Beauty’s mine did draw” (13), again suggesting that her beauty was drawn directly from a world of perfection, a world of forms, or, in this case: a world of blueprints. Nothing quite captures the Platonism that infuses Sidney’s work as well as Plato’s own explanation in The Allegory of the Cave. For an introduction to this philosophy, watch this animated interpretation of The Allegory of the Cave on the right (fun fact: it’s narrated by Orson Welles!).

  • Despite the overwhelming presence of Platonic thought in his work and his clear effort to distance himself from tired tropes, many scholars incorrectly classify Sidney as a Petrarchan sonneteer. Indeed, his sonnets were certainly “Petrarchan” in their structural composition (employing the rhyme scheme invented by and named after the famous Italian). However, Sidney’s approach to love differs inherently from that of the poets who most faithfully emulated Petrarch in their work. As Paul N. Siegel defines it, “Courtly love poetry in the Petrarchan fashion derives from the chivalric tradition of free love and adultery” (“The Petrarchan Sonneteers and Neo-Platonic Love,” 165), a definition that carries extra weight in consideration of the fact that in composing devotional sonnets for Laura, Petrarch composed for a married woman. While Petrarch would later turn to religion following her premature death, the theme of the unattainable woman (often made so by existing bonds of marriage) was preserved in the poetry of his imitators. Sidney, then, cannot be categorized as a Petrarchan sonneteer. While Astrophil and Stella is indeed an account of a man’s desire for a married woman, its greater message lies in his self-denial and his redirection of his love for Stella unto God. Furthermore, Astrophil’s love for Stella does not exist exclusively in the physical sense, as the Petrarchan lover’s often does. He admires her physical beauty, but he loves the “true beauty” of her virtue (Sonnet V, 9). Such emphasis on beauty existing in the spiritual realm as opposed to the physical one is a deeply Platonic approach to life and, in Astrophil’s case, love. However, even the gratification of this “Platonic love,” as Siegel explains, does not free him from his desires for something more, something of spiritual perfection:

 

      • When at last Stella is moved to grant him her love, he is overjoyed, although his passion is not to be satisfied. . . . After a period in which he experiences the delights of Platonic love, mingled with strains of longing and outbreaks of grief at her absence or illness, he asks Stella to give him permission to leave her for an enterprise of great moment, in the pursuit of which he may be able to regain his freedom from her. . . . And so, the young courtier frees himself of his knightly passion, which had threatened to wreck the career appointed for him by his great Taskmaster, and devotes himself wholly to the active service of God (182).

 

  • In the sequence, Sidney’s Astrophil demonstrates a profound Neo-Platonic love that transcends physical nature and yearns for perfection that can be found in no mortal. In his turn to God, Astrophil’s quest for true love stretches miles beyond the traditional Petrarchan one of sensual conquest. Here, Sidney demonstrates a major break from convention that not only reemphasizes his individuality for his readers, but encourages them to seek truth in love for God instead of love for woman. Astrophil and Stella, then, can be interpreted as a fusion of Sidney’s idealistic Neo-Platonic philosophy and fierce Protestant beliefs in a mission to redefine the concept of “love” in love poetry.

 

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