Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats
As I mentioned in my first post about this nice little anthology, there are many poets profiled here (including Anonymous persons), and I will pick and choose the ones I want to pull out. Sometimes the person only has one poet in the anthology, or sometimes I just don’t feel I have anything to say about said poet. Whatever. I’m making this up as I go!
Sir Philip Sidney was on the planet at the same time as Shakespeare, and it’s amazing to see his poems, which have their merits, but when you realize what was going on, just across the town at the Globe Theatre, the poems cower in comparison. That’s the thing about Shakespeare. However: poetry was a big deal at that time. Everyone wrote it. It was considered an important skill for people of a certain class to have. Sidney was a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, and it sounds a bit like they had a rocky relationship. He was in favor, out of favor, for this or that offense. Regardless, he was right at the heart of power. He had a very interesting life. Read the bare bones of it here. He was famous in his day, and when he died (a young man), he was publicly mourned. His reputation was perfect: he was the perfect courtier, the “flower of chivalry”.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets
In every page of his life, he seems to have lived up to the prescriptions and advice of Castiglione’s influential textbook The Courtier, even down to the matter of writing verse – not in the expectation of becoming a great writer but because “at the least wise he shall receive so much profit, that by that exercise he shall be able to give his judgement on other men’s doings.” So too he should know music and painting.
There is some speculation he was gay, and I suppose that’s the case with … well, almost everyone. Sir Philip Sidney, in his role as courtier, also encouraged other young artists and writers, bankrolling them and giving them assignments. Poets were public people in those days, much more so than they are now. I haven’t read all of his stuff, and much of it I find rather deadly, although very interesting because of what it reveals about the time. His wasn’t an original talent. He was an imitator. A mimic. And so you can see, in his verse, the vast sphere of influences working on him. Shakespeare, too, was influenced by the Italians and their sonnets, especially Petrarch – but he so far surpassed their influence that you can no longer even see them in his work. It was a starting-off place, but what he created with it was its own thing entirely. (Kind of like Metallica with their influences. Yes, they were influenced by Ozzy and AC/DC, but they took those influences and created something entirely new.) Yes, Metallica in the same post as Sir Philip Sidney. This is the fun of doing a Daily Book Excerpt, without over-thinking it. Sir Philip Sidney, however, always shows his influences. He is obedient, he plays the game by the accepted rules of the day. He was a member of the most powerful court in the world. He took that job seriously. He had his opinions, and clearly was not afraid to voice them, which caused Queen Elizabeth to put him out to pasture, from time to time, but in terms of his poetry, he worked within the rigid rules of his day.
I am not a poetry expert, just a fan, so I like to see how things develop, even if parts of it are not to my taste. Sir Philip Sidney is a huge part of the vast landscape of English poetry, and left behind a big body of work for such a young man. When he died, he was eulogized far and wide by other big poets of the day. His good friend Fulke Greville wrote an “Epitaph” for Sidney, in which he says:
Salute the stones, that keep the limbs, that held so good a mind.
Schmidt summarizes Sidney thus:
…Sir Philip Sidney, to judge from the purity of his diction, the conventionality of his writing, the elevation of his sentiment, was pure spirit. “Reason, look to thyself! I serve a goddess.” He is the first major English poet-critic, a model of correctness, clarity and measure. A man with enviable social advantages, he put them to full use and excelled in all he did. He has been portrayed as the most umambiguously attractive English writer, a Renaissance uomo universale without Surrey’s ambition or Ralegh’s hubris. He was all of a piece, a bit brittle, with a carefully acquired polish, but noble and consistent in thought and action.
John Aubrey, a 17th century writer and critic, wrote in his typically gossipy way of Sidney:
Sir Philip Sydney, Knight, whose Fame shall never dye, whilest Poetrie lives, was the most accomplished Cavalier of his time. He was not only an excellent witt, but extremely beautiful: he much resembled his sister, but his Haire was not red, but a little incling, viz. a darke ambor colour. If I were to find fault in it, methinkes ’tis not masculine enough; yett he was a person of great courage.
And there we go with the gay rumors!
One of the things that stands out for me in Sidney’s poetry is how often it is about Poetry itself. Poem after poem addresses the “Muse”, and when he speaks of love, it seems indistinguishable from artistic inspiration. Another tenor of the times, and one of the reasons why he is interesting. Who knows who he really was, because he sure doesn’t reveal it in his writing. Schmidt has some interesting points:
Sidney’s aesthetic is inseparable from his general view of life. The idea of imitation was crucial. The artist is a second creator producing a second nature. He imitates the ideal, showing what may or should be rather than merely copying what is …Certainly Sidney today attracts interest, not for what his poetry and fictional prose say, but for what they don’t quite say, what they imply, what they withhold as they twitch the curtain over it. And for what his too-celebrated life does not disclose …Something is missing in Sidney’s poems. Is this absence what the poems are about? Or are they politenesses, accomplishments like horsemanship or fencing or singing or playing the spinet? Or have they if not attestable occasions, then personal motives?… In Elizabethan times – how different the Jacobean age, before the theaters were closed! – fiction, whatever the complications of sexual desire and impulse, had to end by affirming the norm.
And someone like Sir Philip Sidney, woven into the courtly system, would be more reticent than, say, a Shakespeare, who was more of a free agent (although he certainly did his share of monarch-stroking). Sir Philip Sidney was a public man. Everything he wrote was to be shared, performed, published. He was not a lonely poet in a garret, writing mainly for himself, and that very fact impacts his verse, although who knows how or where. I like Schmidt’s idea that it is what Sidney DOESN’T say that is perhaps most important in understanding him. I like mysteries like that, especially of the literary variety. I haven’t even gotten into the intense relationship he had with his extraordinary sister, but if you’re interested in that, you can look it up. They were collaborators. A mind-meld.
Sidney was a huge influence on the writers of his day, including Shakespeare (there are websites devoted to finding parallels between Sidney and Shakespeare). Shakespeare, another literary thief, stole some of Sidney’s themes and language for his sonnets – taking as his jumping-off point Sidney’s series of sonnets to “Stella”, a beautiful aloof woman Sidney despairs of winning over. The Stella sonnets were widely read at the time, huge hits. Shakespeare would have been fully aware of them.
Here is Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet to “sleep” (part of the Stella-sonnet series), which has a couple of great lines in it, my favorite being: “O make in me these civil wars to cease”. What a perfect description of insomnia, and what it’s like when your mind starts racing when you can’t sleep. You can certainly hear the echoes of this poem in Shakespeare.
Come, Sleep! O Sleep
Come, Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw:
O make in me those civil wars to cease!
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf of noise and blind of light,
A rosy garland, and a weary head:
And if these things, as being thine in right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella’s image see.
He would have been just short of six years old while this was happening. Too bad – I went right back to see if he was in the background of any group scenes in London, the moreso since it’s his Aunt and Uncle who occasion the good Doctor’s trip to court.
Nice scene with Uncle Bob and his Father, though.