Astrophil and Stella

I found it much harder to read 'Astrophil and Stella' then 'The Defense of Poesy'. 'The Defense of Poesy', written in prose, used more colloquial English of Sidney's time. This type of English although different from modern English used today is definitely easier to understand then when put against the foreign language of poetry. And not just any poetry but poetry of the late 16th Century.

That aside, I enjoyed many of the sonnets that Sidney put together. The speaker in this series of sonnets is a young love-sick courtier, whose affection is inconveniently for a married woman. This speaker is not unlike that of Shakespearian or Petrarchian Sonnets. Structurally different (other than the framework of the sonnet) but thematically similar. I found it very interesting that Astrophil the Courtier names his lady Stella after a star, and he a star lover. Relating to some of the points made in the lectures, I noticed that Sidney looks to Petrarch for influence. Not only in direct reference of his name (which he sprinkles in some of the sonnets), but also in style, and genre (the idea of courtly love). But as influenced as he may have been of Petrarch, both himself and Petrarch seemed to write quite differently. In my opinion Petrarch was a much smoother writer than Sidney, and this is quite distinguishable in looking at the rhetorical devices that Sidney used.

Sidney liked alliterate and other repetitive devices of such manner. He will often juxtapose words in a line, sometimes words that contrast, as in an oxymoron, and sometimes the same word as found here in Sonnet 5 " True, and yet true...". Here in particular this device was used to separate the 'ideal' versus 'ideality'. In defiance against the metrical norm of poetry, instead of integrating monosyllabic with polysyllabic words to form a balanced rhythm, Sidney sometimes strung a line of monosyllabic words together " I may, I must, I can, I will, I do " (sonnet 47). Maybe Sidney was further proving that he was not afraid to defy convention in order to deliver the message through the best use of the medium.