{"id":151548,"date":"2025-11-30T08:00:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=151548"},"modified":"2025-11-29T09:34:42","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T14:34:42","slug":"happy-birthday-sir-philip-sidney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=151548","title":{"rendered":"“Look in thy heart and write.” — Sir Philip Sidney"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n“[The poet] doth grow in effect another nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclopes, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely, ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.” — Sir Philip Sidney, Apology for Poesy<\/em>, 1595<\/big><\/p>\n

Sir Philip Sidney was born on this day in 1554, and so this means he was on the planet at the same time as Shakespeare. <\/p>\n

His poems are good, but when you remember what was going on just across town at the Globe Theatre, Sidney goes into total eclipse. You can barely perceive him. Shakespeare has a tendency to do that to his contemporaries. <\/p>\n

Sidney was a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, and it appears to have been a rocky relationship. He was in favor, out of favor; either way, he was right at the heart of power. He had a very interesting life. He was famous in his day; he died when he was 31, of gangrene following being wounded in battle (the Battle of Zutphen, part of the Eighty Years’ War). He was well-known enough in the culture to be publicly mourned. Edmund Spenser wrote an Ode when Sidney died. So did Sir Walter Ralegh. I posted both of them below. Listen, some people do like to actually read. I write for THOSE people. Sidney was so famous in his day that a friend’s tombstone had for its epitaph: “Friend of Sir Philip Sidney.” <\/p>\n

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\nHe’s still so famous that he was a running joke in various Monty Python sketches. Anyone remember “The Life of Sir Philip Sidney” aka “Elizabethan Pornography Smugglers”? I have tried, and failed, to find the sketch on YouTube. But being used as a joke, with the understanding that your audience will totally get it, literally 400 years after your life on earth has ended … THAT’S immortality. You could say Sir Philip Sidney, a famous knight, was the guiding star of Monty Python’s Holy Grail<\/i>. <\/p>\n

There’s a popular story about him: as he lay on his death bed, he gave his water to another wounded soldier, saying, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine” (This story, incidentally, per Wikipedia, inspired the “Sir Philip Sidney game” in “signaling theory,” developed by John Maynard Smith.)<\/p>\n

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Sir Philip Sidney, in his role as courtier, encouraged other young artists and writers, bankrolling them and giving them assignments. Poets were public people in those days. He wrote a famous sequence of sonnets called Astrophel and Stella<\/em>. Thomas Wyatt brought Petrarch into English culture: this was a major achievement\/breakthrough, and poets immediately began experimenting, using it, exploring it. Sir Philip Sidney was one of those poets. He wrote things which were performed for Queen Elizabeth. He wrote a gigantic essay called A Defense of Poetry<\/em> (you can read it here<\/a>), basically a survey course of Renaissance literature, really the first of its kind. It’s fascinating because it’s a critical essay written in Shakespeare’s time, from the thick of it, describing all the upheavals in poetry, history, philosophy, religion, culture … you get snapshots of the Elizabethan era, of Elizabethan theatre … <\/p>\n

You can see, in Sidney’s verse, the vast sphere of influences working on him. Shakespeare, too, was deeply influenced by Petrarchan sonnets – but Shakespeare so far surpassed his influences he vaporized them. You don’t even sense them anymore. You just sense SHAKESPEARE.<\/p>\n

Sidney’s poetry is often is about Poetry itself. The Elizabethan era saw a flourishing of the English language and how it could be used, expressively. The English language came into its own. Sidney’s fascination with poetry in his own time and language dominates. Poem after poem addresses the “Muse”When he speaks of love, you can see “love” as indistinguishable from artistic inspiration. <\/p>\n

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\nSomeone like Sir Philip Sidney, a public man, attached to one of the famous courts in the world, would be more reticent about certain topics than, say, a Shakespeare, who was more of a free agent (although he did his share of monarch-stroking). Everything Sidney wrote was to be shared, performed, published. I haven’t even gotten into the intense relationship he had with his extraordinary sister, but if you’re interested, you can look it up. What is it with these poets – like Sidney, like Wordsworth – and their obsessive relationships with sisters? <\/p>\n

There are websites devoted to finding parallels between the Sidney and Shakespeare, looping together these contemporaries, based on the assumption they each read the others’ work. Shakespeare, a literary thief of the highest order, 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 and Shakespeare would have been fully aware of them. Queen Elizabeth was also a poet, and Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets<\/i>, observes Sidney’s influence on her verse. <\/p>\n

Here is Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet to “sleep” (part of the Stella-sonnet series). There are a couple of great lines in it, my favorite being: “O make in me these civil wars to cease”. A perfect description of insomnia, your mind racing<\/i>, making it impossible to drift off into oblivion. <\/p>\n

Come, Sleep! O Sleep<\/big><\/h3>\n

Come, Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
\nThe baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
\nThe poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
\nTh’ indifferent judge between the high and low;
\nWith shield of proof shield me from out the prease
\nOf those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw:
\nO make in me those civil wars to cease!
\nI will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
\nTake thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
\nA chamber deaf of noise and blind of light,
\nA rosy garland, and a weary head:
\nAnd if these things, as being thine in right,
\nMove not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
\nLivelier than elsewhere, Stella’s image see.<\/p>\n

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Quotes<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Sir Philip Sidney on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chaucer, undoubtedly, did excellently in his Troilus and Criseyde<\/em>; of whom, truly, I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age go so stumblingly after him. Yet had he great wants, fit to be forgiven in so reverent an antiquity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Friend Fulke Greville wrote an “Epitaph” for Sidney:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Salute the stones, that keep the limbs, that held so good a mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, writes:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[Spenser] befriended Sir Philip Sidney, to whom the Calender is dedicated. Indeed the poem exemplifies the rules and qualities that Sidney and his circle had been advocating … Aubrey gives an amusing, if not dependable, account of Spenser paying court to the noblest of the knight poets. He was at work on The Faerie Queene<\/em> and brought Sir Philip Sidney a copy. Sidney was busy and did not peruse it immediately. Spenser departed tetchily. When Sidney did begin to read, he was impressed and called the poet back, “mightily caressed him, and ordered his servant to give him so many pounds in gold…”<\/p>\n

With Sidney, Spenser formed a literary club called the Areopagus, devoted to naturalizing classical meters in English. Was this the first English poetry society, devoted to promoting a movement? It chose an aloof name: the Aeropagus is the hell of Mars in Athens, near the Acropolis, where the “Upper Council,” the city’s supreme judiciary, convened.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sir Philip Sidney: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Reason, look to thyself! I serve a goddess.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ben Jonson, as told to William Drummond:<\/strong><\/p>\n

His censure of the English poets was this: that Sidney did not keep a decorum in making everyone speak as well as himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

John Aubrey, a 17th-century writer and critic, wrote in his typically gossipy way:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, we all know what that LAST sentence means. I suppose being a literal KNIGHT and WARRIOR wasn’t enough, Aubrey? Aubrey wasn’t the only one to make this observation.<\/p>\n

J.E. Spingarn on Sidney’s Apology for Poesy<\/em>, 1595: <\/strong><\/p>\n

So thoroughly is it imbued with this spirit, that no other work, Italian, French, or English, can be said to give so complete and so noble a conception of the temper and principles of Renaissance criticism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Schmidt on Sidney’s Apology for Poesy<\/em>, 1595: <\/strong><\/p>\n

It is a justification of the freedom of language, exploration and concern that poetry might enable. The strategy Sidney adopts, which is not to answer the attack but to advocate “in parallel,” is a rhetorical approach rarely used. In recent years Eavan Boland, trying within Irish poetry to clear a female space, employs the same kind of unaggressive, reasonable and reasoned strategy. It is hard to answer because it adjusts the counters of argument in an unexpected way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sir Philip Sidney, 1581:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I must confess my own barbarousness, I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung out by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than a rude style; which, being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[Thomas] Wyatt was a revisionist, but a transmitter, like his friend and disciple, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who took blank verse into English, again from the Italian. Sir Philip Sidney, beloved for his personality and chivalry, might have been the first major poet of the English Renaissance but for his death in battle at the age of thirty-two, a Protestant hero fighting for Holland’s freedom from Spain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Schmidt:<\/strong><\/p>\n

…Sir Philip Sidney, to judge from the purity of his diction, the conventionality of his writing, the elevation of his sentiment, was pure spirit… 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<\/i> 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

from “Astrophel. A Pastoral Elegie upon the Death of the most noble and valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney”<\/strong><\/big>
\nBy Edmund Spenser<\/strong><\/p>\n

But live thou there still happy happy Spirit,
\nAnd give us leave thee here thus to lament;
\nNot thee that doost thy Heavens Joy inherit,
\nBut our own selves, that here in Dole are drent.
\nThus do we weep and wail, and wear our Eyes,
\nMourning in others our own Miseries.<\/p>\n

Which when she ended had, another Swain
\nOf gentle Wit, and dainty sweet Device;
\nWhom Astrophel full dear did entertain
\nWhilst here he liv’d, and held in passing price;
\nHight Thestylis, began his mournful tourn,
\nAnd made the Muses in his Song to mourn.<\/p>\n

And after him full many other moe,
\nAnd every one in order lov’d him best,
\n‘Gan dight themselves t’ express their inward Woe,
\nWith doleful Layes unto the Time addrest.
\nThe which I here in order will rehearse,
\nAs fittest Flowres to deck his mournful Hearse.<\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Sidney’s verse, like his prose, like his official life, is exemplary, like a statue: handsome, evocative of an age, an intelligence, even if the stone is cold. Yet it is not so cold, or so white as it has come to seem. There is more of Ralegh, and perhaps of Marlowe, in Sidney than the record has admitted; and perhaps in Ralegh more of Sidney than his blustery history leads us at first to acknowledge. Yet on Elizabeth’s poems – she was after all an accomplished writer – his imprint is firm. Her poem “On Monsieur’s Departure” has some of her fallen knight’s nice delicacy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Henry John Todd, Works of Spenser<\/em> (1805):<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is ‘dedicated to the most beautifull and vertuous Ladie, the Countess of Essex.’ This Lady had been the wife of Sidney, and was now married to the Earl of Essex. She was the daughter of the memorable Sir Francis Walsingham. Sir Philip left by her an only daughter. His affectionate attention to this Lady and to her family, is abundantly shewn in his Will, preserved by Collins in his Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of the Sidneys<\/em>. It had been first proposed for Sir Philip to marry a daughter of Secretary Cecil, on the recommendation of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester; and his own choice, in earlier days, is said to have been unsuccessfully fixed on Lady Rich. Of this latter circumstance Spenser makes an elegant use…. The poet, with inimitable pathos, thus relates a feigned event, ‘To prove that death their hearts cannot divide, | Which living were in love so firmly tide.’ He relates, that Stella, after many fruitless offices of tendered love, barely witnessed the last pains of the wounded Astrophel, and followed him ‘like turtle chaste;’ and then he most poetically adds: ‘The gods, which all things see, this same beheld; | And, pittying this paire of lovers trew, | Transformed them there lying on the field | Into one flowre that is both red and blew….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Spenser had a particular genius both for elegy and for celebration. His great elegy is “Astrophel,” his eloquently measured lament for the heroic Sir Philip Sidney.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Schmidt:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rowland Freeman, Kentish Poets (1821) on Spenser’s “Astrophel”:<\/strong> <\/p>\n

We shall venture to make one remark only upon this poem. It is a little extraordinary that Spenser though he has dedicated his elegy to Sidney’s widow, then Countess of Essex, should make no mention of that lady in any part of it. We are assured that she accompanied her husband in his unfortunate expedition, and assiduously watched over him in the anxious interval from the time of his being wounded, until his death. The introduction of Lady Rich, or Stella, is still more extraordinary, when the dedication is considered in connection with the following lines: \u2014 ‘For one alone he car’d, for one he sighed, | Stella the fair! | Her did he love, her he alone did honour: | Her, and but her, of love he worthy deemed, | For all the rest but little he esteemed.’ Mr. Todd remarks, that ‘the early love of Sir Philip Sidney for Lady Rich is converted into a beautiful fiction in Spenser’s Elegy of Astrophel.’ To the present writer, this fiction appears in a directly opposite light, as one particularly unfortunate, and considering the party to whom the Elegy is dedicated, almost indecorous; very much unlike the manner of the gentle and courtly Spenser. It may, however, perhaps, admit of the following explanation: \u2014 Spenser’s Elegy was written before the publication of Sidney’s poetry entitled Astrophel and Stella, which was probably never communicated to him in manuscript. The Poet had doubtless heard of the poetic designation of Sidney’s mistress, but her real name was unknown to him. \u2014 The haughty and high-born Sidney, though he condescended to patronize and encourage the ‘lowly strains’ of Spenser, was not very likely to select the plebeian bard for a confidant in an affair of so much delicacy. May we not then presume that Spenser, in celebrating the loves of Astrophel and Stella, had no other person in his view than the Countess of Essex herself, whom he considered as the original of Stella? This conjecture receives support from some expressions in the ‘Mourning Muse,’ where Stella, lamenting the death of Sidney, is made to call him her ‘true and faithful Pheer,’ and her ‘trusty guide’.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Schmidt: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Sidney was loved and revered; Ralegh was feared and despised by all but his close circle. Both were legendas alive – and dead. Sidney was born with the silver spoon, but Ralegh’s spoon was merely plated. He had to make his way by talent, wit, chicanery, and strength.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What we regard as English Renaissance poetry has an immediate Italian source, just as Chaucer found an origin in Dante and Boccaccio. Sir Thomas Wyatt journeyed to Italy in 1526-1527 and returned with a deep passion for Petrarch’s sonnets. Wyatt’s versions of Petrarch are mostly very free, with very mixed metrics, and yet they began a new poetry in English, since Petrarch’s poetics had inaugurated what, in retrospect, seems the art of the unsaid, vastly developed in the ironies of Chaucer and the extraordinary of ellipses of Shakespeare, in his plays as in his sonnets. John Freccero says of Petrarch’s self-portrait that it is precisely immortal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An Epitaph upon the Right Honourable Sir Philip Sidney, Knight, Lord Governor of Flushing; 1586 <\/strong><\/big>
\nBy Sir Walter Ralegh<\/p>\n

TO praise thy life or wail thy worthy death,
\n And want thy wit,\u2014thy wit high, pure, divine,\u2014
\n Is far beyond the power of mortal line,
\nNor any one hath worth that draweth breath;\t<\/p>\n

Yet rich in zeal (though poor in learning\u2019s lore),
\n And friendly care obscured in secret breast,
\n And love that envy in thy life suppressed,\u2014
\nThy dear life done,\u2014and death hath doubled more.\t<\/p>\n

And I, that in thy time and living state
\n Did only praise thy virtues in my thought,
\n As one that seeld the rising sun hath sought,
\nWith words and tears now wail thy timeless fate.\t<\/p>\n

Drawn was thy race aright from princely line;
\n Nor less than such, by gifts that nature gave,\u2014
\n The common mother that all creatures have,\u2014
\nDoth virtue show, and princely lineage shine.\t<\/p>\n

A king gave thee thy name; a kingly mind,\u2014
\n That God thee gave,\u2014who found it now too dear
\n For this base world, and hath resumed it near
\nTo sit in skies, and sort with powers divine.\t <\/p>\n

Kent thy birth-days, and Oxford held thy youth;
\n The heavens made haste, and stayed nor years nor time;
\n The fruits of age grew ripe in thy first prime;
\nThy will, thy words; thy words the seals of truth.\t<\/p>\n

Great gifts and wisdom rare employed thee thence,
\n To treat from kings with those more great than kings;
\n Such hope men had to lay the highest things
\nOn thy wise youth, to be transported hence.\t<\/p>\n

Whence to sharp wars sweet honour did thee call,
\n Thy country\u2019s love, religion, and thy friends;
\n Of worthy men the marks, the lives, and ends,
\nAnd her defence, for whom we labour all.\t<\/p>\n

There didst thou vanquish shame and tedious age,
\n Grief, sorrow, sickness, and base fortune\u2019s might;
\n Thy rising day saw never woeful night,
\nBut passed with praise from off this worldly stage.\t<\/p>\n

Back to the camp by thee that day was brought,
\n First thine own death; and after thy long fame;
\n Tears to the soldiers; the proud Castilian\u2019s shame;
\nVirtue expressed, and honour truly taught.\t <\/p>\n

What hath he lost that such great grace hath won?
\n Young years for endless years, and hope unsure
\n Of fortune\u2019s gifts for wealth that still shall dure:
\nO happy race, with so great praises run!\t<\/p>\n

England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same;
\n Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried;
\n The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died;
\nThy friends thy want; the world thy virtue\u2019s fame;\t<\/p>\n

Nations thy wit; our minds lay up thy love;
\n Letters thy learning; thy loss years long to come;
\n In worthy hearts sorrow hath made thy tomb;
\nThy soul and spright enrich the heavens above.\t<\/p>\n

Thy liberal heart embalmed in grateful tears,
\n Young sighs, sweet sighs, sage sighs, bewail thy fall;
\n Envy her sting, and spite hath left her gall;
\nMalice herself a mourning garment wears.\t<\/p>\n

That day their Hannibal died, our Scipio fell,\u2014
\n Scipio, Cicero, and Petrarch of our time;
\n Whose virtues, wounded by my worthless rhyme,
\nLet angels speak, and heaven thy praises tell.<\/p>\n

From “Elegy of Poets and Poesie” (1627)<\/strong><\/big>
\nBy Michael Drayton<\/strong><\/p>\n

The noble Sidney, with this last arose,
\nThat Heroe for numbers, and for Prose.
\nThat throughly pac’d our language as to show,
\nThe plenteous English hand in hand might goe
\nWith Greeke and Latine, and did first reduce
\nOur tongue from Lillies writing then in use;
\nTalking of Stones, Stars, Plants, of fishes, Flyes,
\nPlaying with words, and idle Similies,
\nAs th’ English, Apes and very Zanies be
\nOf every thing, that they doe heare and see,
\nSo imitating his ridiculous tricks,
\nThey spake and writ, all like meere lunatiques.<\/p>\n

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