Astrophil and Stella

Sidney, Sir Philip

doi:10.1093/oseo/instance.00007491

Cited by 12 publications

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“…For instance, Sir Philip Sidney uses childbirth as a metaphor for poetic creativity in the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, when the speaker, who is attempting to find "fit words to paint the blackest face of woe," exclaims: "Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, /Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite, / 'Fool,' says my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write'" (Sidney, 2006). Here, Sidney draws a comparison between a writer and labouring mother.…”

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Birthing and Mining in John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed”

Frayne¹

2017

ALS

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This paper uncovers an aspect of "To His Mistress Going to Bed" that has largely been ignored by critics of the poem, namely, the poem's interest in the interrelationship between power, geological exploration, and childbirth. Over the past twenty years, social historians and historians of medicine have explored early modern accounts of childbirth, making it possible for scholars to recover the historical context framing Donne's depictions of childbirth. Placing "To His Mistress" within this historical context forces us to rethink a number of critical assumptions about the poem: in particular that the poem concerns sex but not procreation. In this paper, I explore the implications that medical beliefs about reproduction and the medical politics of childbirth had for Donne as he set about trying to dramatize male desire and uncover the hidden interior of the female body. My historical analysis reveals how the poem fits within the early modern conversation about women's reproductive power and artificial birth. By illuminating interwoven references to childbirth with references to mining, I situate Donne's poem within the larger early modern conversation about women's reproductive power and artificial birth. This repositioning has important implications for Donne's sexual politics and the medical context informing his work.

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Birthing and Mining in John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed”

Frayne¹

2017

ALS

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“…13 Sidney's Stella remains closer to Neo-Platonic and Petrarchan conventions, but she also departs from these in a sonnet sequence honestly exploring how an imperfect star lady and her star lover manage mutual roles and conflicts under canopies of starlight or-what is almost the same thing-Stella's beaming eyes, the literal "light of my life." 14 Spenser varies this pattern only slightly in the introductory sonnet of his Amoretti, in which his beloved Elizabeth Boyle "hold[s] my life in" her white hands, enlivening his verse "with [the] starry light" of her "lamping eyes." 15 Sonnet 9 extends this light analogy to every celestial body under and including the sun; stars, moon, and lightning at once reflect the fire of her eyes and the cosmic ring of fire that fortunately illumines but does not "consume" the beholder.…”

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“…Sonnet 72 of Spenser's Amoretti seems particularly influenced by Sidney's sonnet 91 which, as quoted above, claims Stella's heavenly beauty is the only true "map" of the cosmic spheres, since by comparison, other earthly "stars" are mere "wood-globes" or crude models of the "glist'ring skies." 17 Taking the hyperbole even further, Spenser imagines his beloved propelling him on a flight through the stars. Looking "up to the purest sky," he laments his lack of "bolder winges," only to find them in her "soverayne beauty," the image of heavenly glory and "blisse."…”

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Milton’s and Donne’s Stargazing Lovers, Sex, and the New Astronomy

Martin¹

2014

sel

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This article compares Milton’s and John Donne’s surprisingly convergent ideas on love and sex by examining how their respective lovers gaze at the stars and the divine plan(s) behind them. Both poets significantly re-sexualize the Platonic tradition spiritualized by Ficino and Anglicized by Sidney and Spenser, while conserving much of its essence. The human soul and human soulmates still descend from the heavens, light, and the love and beauty emanating from God’s chain of being, but with fully erotic needs and desires. Both poets also accept the new astronomy, yet Donne prefers love scenes that reinvent Ptolemy’s “perfect” concentric cosmos while Milton’s lovers inhabit a boundless universe.

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“…Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece both occur in classical, Ovidian settings in ancient Greek mythology and pre-Republican Rome, The Lover's Complaint takes place on the banks of the Thames, and the lyrical sonnets seem to draw on the English landscape even more than Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, which in the opening lines of sonnet 30 imagines that the powerful Ottoman Empire might begin to encroach on Europe: 'Whether the Turkish new Moone minded be ⁄ To fill her hornes this yeere on Christian coast' (1-2). 7 However, I would like to suggest that in Shakespeare's poetry -and in Renaissance English poetry in general -there is more to the East than meets the eye. Perhaps our mistake has been in attempting to map the same categories of 'East', we find in drama onto poetry.…”

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The East as Poetic Commodity in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Jacobson

2011

Literature Compass

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Although a great deal of current scholarship explores the impact of England’s trade with the Ottoman Empire and the East on early modern drama and travel narratives, very little has turned to poetry, and even less to Shakespeare’s poetry. I suggest that this is because we have been asking the wrong questions of early modern poetry. Instead of searching for representations of Oriental identity in poetry, we should look for evidence of the interplay of Eastern aesthetics and commodities in English verse, in order to interpret the intellectual and artistic effects of the mercantile and political exchange between East and West. This essay attempts to uncover an Eastern aesthetic in Shakespeare’s first narrative poem, Venus and Adonis. I contend that Adonis’s horse and the flower into which he transforms function as imported Eastern aesthetic commodities in the poem on many levels. First, the prized Arabian stallion’s Eastern heritage both exoticizes and naturalizes desire. Second, as valuable aesthetic objects capable of being bred (the horse) and propagated (the bulb) to generate economic success, both horse and flower perform the poetic and rhetorical roles of furthering the poem’s goal of out‐stripping Ovid and classical poetry and making a name for Shakespeare in the literary marketplace. Though Venus is unsuccessful in her courtship, Adonis’s horse and the flower into which he transforms are not. Their display in the poem attempts to breed fame and fortune for the poem’s new author in the same way an expensive imported animal or botanical specimen might for a nobleman, counteracting the poem’s narrative outcome.

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Astrophil and Stella

Cited by 12 publications

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Birthing and Mining in John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed”

Birthing and Mining in John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed”

Milton’s and Donne’s Stargazing Lovers, Sex, and the New Astronomy

The East as Poetic Commodity in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

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