Astrophel and Stella: Pure and Impure Persuasion Author(s): Richard Lanham Publication Details: English Literary Renaissance 2.1 (Winter 1972): p100-115. Source: Poetry Criticism. Ed. Ellen McGeagh. Vol. 32. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Critical essay Bookmark: Bookmark this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

[(essay date 1972) In the following essay, Lanham contends that the essential cause of the poem sequence Astrophel and Stella is sexual frustration.]

The first sonnet in Sir Philip Sidney's sequence confronts the difficulty of writing poetry with a stale and borrowed rhetoric, the need to seek a fresh source of inspiration in real feeling and, presumably, in an unaffected praise and relationship to his mistress. Style becomes not only means but theme, and this at the earliest possible moment. Sidney betrays, too, that acute self-consciousness wherever we touch him, in life or art. Both poet and poetry assert themselves as of thematic consequence. The first line of the poem opens that dichotomy between words and deeds we come upon so often in the Old Arcadia, and the sonnet as a whole would seem to pledge an effort to close it, to make sure that the "Loving in truth" is the kind of love the verse finally reveals. Thus we have a plea for spontaneous response in a world of stale rhetoric: "The famous first sonnet of Astrophel and Stella is a manifesto of sincerity, an eloquent rejection of anything but the strictest devotion to honest feeling."1 Pursuing this train of thought, J. W. Lever finds the subject of Astrophil and Stella in Sidney's attempt to remain true to his own feelings when they no longer fit the tradition through which he must express them. "The principal theme of Astrophel and Stella appears, then, as a study of the inner conflicts that romance precipitates in the personality of a contemporary man."2 The "driving force" of the sequence thus becomes "the expression of a complex personality." From here, but a step leads to C. S. Lewis' description of Astrophil and Stella as a "prolonged lyrical meditation."3 The poet's internal struggle stands center stage, then, not his praise of Stella, and he struggles with the intractability of language as well as with the force of love. The anatomy of the struggle has been laid out for us by Richard B. Young's brilliant essay on the poem.4 He traces with great acuity Sidney's adoption of one role after another in his effort to find, or devise, one true to his feelings and acceptable to a larger world of moral and social demands.5 These views, which represent a consensus of the most recent critical thinking on the poem, find their center to be that heart into which Astrophil bids himself look at the end of the first

sonnet. Sidney is imitating himself as poet and Petrarchan rhetor, and we are invited to share the often ironic scrutiny under which he puts himself or his various personae. Insincerity and stale rhetoric, extravagant Petrarchan compliment generally, which Sir Sidney Lee and others complained of, are now seen as the object of the poet's derisory humor, as carefully controlled by the dramatic context. Affectation becomes an important part of the story Sidney seeks to tell. The discrepancy between words and deeds, between real feeling and the rhetorical masks devised to conceal and distort it, emerges as a central theme in the poem, and the poem's relation to the Old Arcadia, which Sidney had written just before, becomes a good deal clearer. And if we think of the heroic assertion of the New Arcadia which followed, perhaps we may legitimately find it a natural development from the heroic possibility which haunts the sonnets. Sidney is free to praise the heroic life precisely because he has inquired so closely into its cost, into the self-control which it demands.

All this agreement I find both attractive and persuasive. Yet the conception of Astrophil and Stella which makes it possible seems to ignore a substantial element in the sequence as a whole. Let us return to the first sonnet:

Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show,That the deare She might take some pleasure of my paine:Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine, I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine:Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flowSome fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn'd braine. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay,Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Studie's blowes,And others' feete still seem'd but strangers in my way.Thus great with child to speake, and helplesse in my throwes, Biting my trewand pen, beating my selfe for spite, 'Foole,' said my Muse to me, 'looke in thy heart and write.'6

The superbly dramatic last line has distracted attention from the considerably more important first four. The opening gradatio is, after all, both the blueprint for, and the raison d'être of, the entire sequence. Sincere Astrophil indeed wants to be. Love in truth, he does. And a sincere rhetoric he indeed wishes to create. But all this is as prologue to the swelling theme. He wants to obtain "grace." He wants to bed the girl. The essential cause of the sequence is sexual frustration. He is fain in verse his love to show because Stella will not allow him to show it in a more satisfactory manner. He tells himself in "Sonnet 70" that "Sonets be not bound prentise to annoy," that his muse can show the "height of delight." But she

cannot, of course. The ironic couplet overturns the specious reasoning of the preceding twelve lines: "I give you here my hand for truth of this, / Wise silence is best musicke unto blisse." To attain that bliss, other kinds of music are tried. A great many kinds play their part, as many roles as Astrophil affects, as many conceits as he presses into service, as many oscillations and vacillations between laus and vituperatio as he wearily traces. Yet all are essentially not poetic but rhetorical; they all aim to persuade. Unless we simply agree to ignore the opening four lines of sonnet 1, the whole sequence is applied poetry. It has an ulterior motive. We find this inadmissible, no doubt. We are free, thus, to ignore it. Sidney seems to have felt differently. His purpose is to persuade the lady, and he begins his sincerity at home by confessing that this is so. For the critic, such a motive must for several reasons be regretted. It is not noble; coming from the pattern of nobility, it is troublesome. Still worse, plain desire, unlike spiritualized love, is not very talk-aboutable. Nor is it distinctive, as we should like Sidney, if he cannot be noble, at least to be. But this is how the sequence begins, and this is how it proceeds. The force of desire suffuses Sidney's dramatization of himself as Astrophil. He uses the word again and again in the sequence, as well as in the famous 31 of Certain Sonnets ("Desire, desire I have too dearely bought, / With price of mangled mind thy worthlesse ware"). The reader may feel that Sidney mounts the Platonic ladder to Love, but he himself makes no such brag:

Desire, though thou my old companion art And oft so clings to my pure Love, that I One from the other scarcely can descrie,While each doth blow the fier of my hart:Now from thy fellowship I needs must part ...(72)

He must refine his desire into Virtue's gold, he tells himself. But, once again, he is whistling in the dark:

But thou Desire, because thou wouldst have all,Now banisht art, but yet alas how shall?

The texts which make "Love" mean predominantly, if not exclusively, "desire" recur so often that the point hardly needs arguing. Desire cries, at the end of 71, "give me some food." The rhyme is Virtue's "good," and there is no doubt as to which wins the contest. Stella in 68 is the "life of my desire." In 58, he is willing to grant Stella's self to Virtue, if he can have her body. In the 8th song, which Young sees as the center of the sequence, what is at stake is the physical act of love, whatever psychic superstructures Sidney's muse might, had he been successful, have afterwards built upon it.

Astrophil can be seen, then, in a posture very different from that of the secular meditator, harrower of the hell within. He looks in his heart, bites his truant pen, to find persuasive devices. Critics today are practiced passing well on a poetry of meditation, and find in it its own justification for being and then some. I do not think such an attitude altogether fits Astrophil and Stella. A very practical purpose haunts Sidney's presentation of self. Such a direction, we should remember, was a very legitimate one for the sonnet-sequence to take. Once it shook free from the narrative obligations which fiction then assumed from the nascent Menippean form (the prose narrative bridges between the poems gradually expanding until they swamped the poetry) the sonnet-sequence might legitimately look out-ward or inward. Outward, it saw the mistress and consummation. It became applied poetry. Or it could look inward, harrow the soul of the poet, and make of love occasions for meditative introspection, so many burial urns for a Thomas Browne. The poetry here was pure, not applied, and a consummation, since it chased away the muse, was devoutly not to be wished.

Astrophil and Stella takes the outward path, desires consummation consummately throughout. Shakespeare makes of the sonnet-sequence a real meditative vehicle; Sidney does not. Shakespeare can do so because he loves both a man and a woman, and the woman he has long possessed. His itches are cosmic, neural, not young, fiery, adolescent. He can also do so because he expresses what the poverty of my style forces me to call a more capacious soul than Sidney's. When Shakespeare looks within himself, he finds an allegorical landscape as large as life. I, and I seem to be alone in this, do not find the heart into which Sidney looks one of any extraordinary richness. His themes are few, his scale hardly vast. On the one side we have desire. On the other, ambition, a bankrupt proverbial wisdom, and some chattering court wits who do not know (how, honestly, could they be expected to?) what is passing in the depths of Astrophil's soul. If love is largely desire, the personality in which it wreaks such havoc is very largely a conventional one. The dramatic power of the sequence, in fact, seems to come from precisely this simplified confrontation between desire and convention. Astrophil's personality comes to be resonant, symbolic, largely because it depicts so clearly, with such powerful drama, the impact of desire on a convention manifestly inadequate to cope with it. Thus dwelling on the richness or the modernity of Astrophil's (or Sidney's) personality, as Lever does, leads up the wrong track. It makes Sidney into a proto-Shakespeare and this is precisely what he was not. There is little deep thinking, aside from the large confrontation we have just described, in Astrophil and Stella, unless it be in the reflections about language we shall subsequently discuss. The "philosophy," upon closer examination, turns out to be largely "argument." Astrophil and Stella is a great poem, but not a great philosophical one.

Kenneth Burke, in one of the most brilliant sections of A Rhetoric of Motives, isolates a concept which he calls "pure persuasion."

With talk of "pure persuasion," the factor of degree can readily confuse us. Thus, we may think of social or literary courtship as pure persuasion, when we contrast it with a direct bid for sexual favors, or with commercial advertising. Similarly, education in contrast with debating might be called pure persuasion. And scientific or religious insemination may seem "pure" when compared with the injection of the doctrinal seed through political ideologies. But all these modes of expression are "impure," and seek advantage, as compared with the absolute, and therefore nonexistent, limit we speak of. Yet, though what we mean by pure persuasion in the absolute sense exists nowhere, it can be present as a motivational ingredient in any rhetoric, no matter how intensely advantage-seeking such rhetoric may be. ... At this stage we need only note that the indication of pure persuasion in any activity is in an element of "standoffishness," or perhaps better, self-interference, as judged by the tests of acquisition. Thus, while not essentially sacrificial, it looks sacrificial when matched against the acquisitive.Pure persuasion involves the saying of something, not for an extra-verbal advantage to be got by the saying, but because of a satisfaction intrinsic to the saying. It summons because it likes the feel of a summons. It would be nonplused if the summons were answered.7

In such a Categorization, we would have to classify the persuasion in Shakespeare's sonnets as "pure," that of Sidney's "impure." His is the direct bid for sexual favors that Shakespeare's is not. And yet where would we rank the persuasion of this sonnet?

With what sharpe checkes I in my selfe am shent, When into Reason's audite I do go: And by just counts my selfe a banckrout knowOf all those goods, which heav'n to me hath lent:Unable quite to pay even Nature's rent, Which unto it by birthright I do ow: And which is worse, no good excuse can show,But that my wealth I have most idly spent. My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes,My wit doth strive those passions to defend,Which for reward spoile it with vaine annoyes.I see my course to lose my selfe doth bend: I see and yet no greater sorow take, Then that I lose no more for Stella's sake.(18)

This is not the least strong of those sonnets which develop the central theme of passion and reason, self-division's cause. We see the poet writhing in the dichotomy, torn in two directions. Yet is he

really? Which attitude does he mean us to take seriously, the regret of the first twelve lines or the very different regret of the last two? Both! we say, schooled on fertile tensions. This is true of course, but two kinds of persuasion seem to be operating. For the first twelve lines, Sidney's sonnet does not seem to be asking for anything at all. Quite the reverse. He regrets what he has lost. Then, in the ironic reverse of the couplet, he regrets that he has not lost more, that he has not more to lose, for Stella's sake. Yet, though he means this, we cannot believe that he means it in the same way as he means the first twelve lines. He would not, that is, welcome a suggestion from Stella as to further vain sacrifices which he might make in her behalf. The last two lines, then, are pure persuasion. He would welcome more self-division, more self-interference, than he has. We have to do with sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, no verbal advantage aimed at. With this in mind, we might again inquire about the status of the first twelve lines. Might those sacrifices, too, be pure? Clearly they cannot be, since they are forced upon the poet. Yet he would not avoid making them; he would make use of them. The "pure persuasion" of the couplet is an attempt to move the whole sonnet into this category, to say to Stella, "See what I lose for you, even myself I will lose, and want only to lose more." Yet the attempt fails and is supposed to fail. The sacrifices of the first twelve lines are severe and severely felt, and worth it only if Stella relents. Thus Astrophil presents his unwilled sorrow as willed, tries to master his frustration by a trick, to transcend it with wit, to use it. This transcendence is what we admire in the sonnet and what Stella is supposed to admire. And, at the same time, she is to see that the victory is temporary, illusory. The attempt at "pure" persuasion is finally "impure," aimed at gaining Stella's consent. So, too, in 59, where Astrophil starts out purely, as wishing to be dog-substitute for Stella. He begins, "Deare, why make you more of a dog than me?" and ends up by implying, through the coy humor of his posturing ("If he be faire, yet but a dog can be ... / He barks, my songs thine owne voyce oft doth prove") that Stella, if she does not say "yes," will be a bitch.

If we think of each of the sonnets as preserving, under the guise of a "pure" sacrifice, an "impure" plea for succor; if we think of each of them as moving up the gradatio of sonnet I; might it not then be possible to consider all the self-divisions of the sonnets as, however deeply (or shallowly, for that matter) felt, introduced into this sequence for particularly rhetorical purposes? Sidney divides himself because of the poetic--and hence finally rhetorical--gain to be got by putting himself back together as a gift to Stella. Might it not be that the meditation, viewed in light of the intention of the first four lines, becomes meditative mannerism in the service of a rhetorical purpose? Otherwise, it seems difficult to explain the continual repudiation of meditation's fruits in the couplet. If the meditations are primarily meditations, they are unusually meagre. So Astrophil

is willing, eager, to repudiate them at the appearance, or even suggestion, of Stella. Look at "Sonnet 47":

What, have I thus betrayed my libertie? Can those blacke beames such burning markes engrave In my free side? or am I borne a slave,Whose necke becomes such yoke of tyranny?Or want I sense to feele my miserie? Or sprite, disdaine of such disdaine to have? Who for long faith, tho dayly helpe I crave,May get no almes but scorne of beggerie. Vertue awake, Beautie but beautie is,I may, I must, I can, I will, I doLeave following that, which it is gaine to misse.Let her go. Soft, but here she comes. Go to, Unkind, I love you not: O me, that eye Doth make my heart give to my tongue the lie.

What it seems to say is that Astrophil can find no resource in his own complexities of character, in the wisdom of meditation. The resources of philosophy are bankrupt when faced with a flesh and blood Stella who scatters them like ghosts at dawn. The sonnet thus dramatizes the failure of introspection. It, and the many like it, might be more clearly conceived as progymnasmata rather than philosophic introspections, rhetorical efforts which press the failure of philosophy into service as a final, clinching argument. Sidney looks in his heart and declaims.

What I have been saying is that posturing, once admitted, admits no natural limitation. If Astrophil, or perhaps we should say Sidney, is "acting a role" at one point, he might be acting a role at any point. How do we judge? We cannot. All roles are equally dramatic and assumed, ludic, all arguments and feelings equally agonistic. All are directed toward changing Stella's mind because the desire Astrophil feels for her is simply of another order of magnitude from any arguments whatsoever. That is real, the rest "rhetoric." Pascal provides the gloss: "Les passions sont les seuls orateurs qui persuadent toujours."

By referring to Astrophil and not to Sidney, I have dodged the problem of who is talking in Astrophil and Stella. It was a pretext. There is no Astrophil in the poem except as a name. It is Sidney who speaks, when he speaks in the "biographical" sonnets, 18, for example, or 24 and 37, or 49 and 53, or 33 and probably, too, in the 8th song. When he postures, it is Sidney who postures and not Astrophil. Sidney did not title the work. Obviously he could not call it (for the manuscript circulation which is all he knew anything about or would have condoned) "Philip and Penelope." He was not trying to hide the truth so much as follow a convention which masked the

truth under flimsy pretext. Young tries, as a formalist should, to see a consistent persona, the obvious biography lending "concrete context" (p. 15), but it is uphill work. Certainly he is right to see the "life," the verve of Sidney's self-portrayal coming not from its biographical veracity but from "his ability to see himself ... as an actor in a variety of situations to which his thought, his feeling, and his manner of expression are adapted" (p. 23). But in a poem so full of posturing, so full of personae, to begin with, what need is there to reify a master persona? What does it add? Why not let the poem be backlighted by biography as Sidney intended? Perhaps the objection advanced by formalist theory may be allayed by remembering that Astrophil and Stella is an illegitimate type to begin with, applied poetry. Its nature as a vehicle of direct courtship makes it biographical from the beginning. Sidney takes as theme, after all, the relation of desire to the literary language available to describe and, presumably, control it. Everything we know about Astrophil and Stella militates against considering it as a finished poem, pure persuasion. He wrote it as an immediate effort to cope with an immediate crisis in feeling. The identities of both hero and heroine were clear. The original small manuscript audience was probably expected to fill in a good deal more biographical information than we now possess. It could supply, above all, the crucial tone, the spirit in which to read, a tone we must re-synthesize from the sonnets themselves. A substantial part of the manuscript audience must have known Sidney and thus had a standard, which the poem does not altogether supply by itself, against which to judge the posturing, the role-playing. I am not saying that the sequence cannot survive extraction from its biographical matrix. It can and has. But why extract it when it obviously gains from being left as the anomalous artifact, half art and half life, which it was? It is because it is applied poetry, poetry which aims directly at making something happen, that it adopts the rhetorical strategy it does.

Ringler, in his commentary, considers that "the legitimate critical procedure is not to ignore the biography but to find out what kind of biography it is" (p. 440). Yet, although he sorts out the biographical information in the poem with patient assiduity, he never answers his own question. What kind of biography is it? The principle of selection seems to me to be not what is needed to create concrete biographical or narrative context, but what is needed to reinforce Sidney's rhetorical purpose. He turns life to use as he turns imaginative life to use. Both try to persuade. He looks in his heart some of the time. At other times, he looks at the world and draws his strategy from there. The principle of choice is rhetorical effectiveness. In 45, for example, the poet looks at the scene in great hall or closet and learns his lesson from it. If fabled or dramatic lovers move Stella, he will become one. Sometimes, as in 101, the event (the sickness of Stella) provides a simple take-off point for a still simpler sonnet. The real world becomes not concrete

detail but a great storage chest of rhetorical argumentation, the Mother of Inventions. Or look at the famous biographical aside, "Rich fooles there be":

Rich fooles there be, whose base and filthy hartLies hatching still the goods wherein they flow:And damning their owne selves to Tantal's smart,Wealth breeding want, more blist, more wretched grow. Yet to those fooles heav'n such wit doth impart,As what their hands do hold, their heads do know,And knowing, love, and loving, lay apartAs sacred things, far from all daunger's show. But that rich foole, who by blind Fortune's lotThe richest gemme of Love and life enjoyes,And can with foule abuse such beauties blot;Let him, deprived of sweet but unfelt joyes, (Exil'd for ay from those high treasures, which He knowes not) grow in only follie rich.(24)

Not much concrete detail is supplied about Lord Rich. Only what is needed for the rhetorical purpose of the poem, the contrast between blind Lord Rich and Sidney, who can see only too well. Lord Rich will grow rich in folly, Sidney in knowledge. Sidney inflates himself by damning Lord Rich, then discards him as a biographical prop.

The same criterion of rhetorical effectiveness should apply to Sidney's own presence in the poem. Critical opinion has ranged widely in this matter. The generation of Sir Sidney Lee found affectation everywhere and the "real" Sidney (i.e., "real feeling") but little. Theodore Spencer, whose ELH article in 1945 really started the current revaluation of Sidney, maintained precisely the opposite: "In Astrophel and Stella Sidney tries deliberately to put convention aside, and to speak out for himself" (p. 268). And David Kalstone recognizes the artifice but sees it as a series of masks: "The mastery of persons is what makes the sonnets of Astrophel and Stella a more flexible medium for writing about love than the sonnets of the Arcadia" (p. 151). A rhetorical perspective finds common ground in all these viewpoints. Sidney certainly searches for his own voice, cries for food as directly as man can. He plays roles. But he also takes up stale affectation without the built-in ironic scrutiny. Young finds the irony pervasive. A recent article by Ann Howe takes issue and finds some of the ironically-defended poems (the early ones after I, for example) simply inept.8 I see no reason why Sidney's rhetorical strategy could not call for convention at one time, ironic counterpoint at another. The concern for consistency stems from considering the sequence as wholly a literary artifact, from ignoring its persuasive purpose. In the baiser

group, for example, a great deal is made of a kiss. The modern reader may find it tedious. Yet Sidney is simply seizing an occasion for persuasive poetry. The occasion did not lend itself to ironic improvement, so irony was left alone. Sidney was a conventional Petrarchan sonneteer playing with a trifle.

I cannot think it useful to number and categorize the roles Sidney plays. In a rhetorical structure such as he has created, any role could fit. And if we cannot find an artistic pattern in the roles, we cannot find a master persona, a standard to judge affectation in terms of the poem itself. Instead, we see Sidney casting about, using for his compulsive purpose whatever comes to hand. Great critics have disputed whether Astrophil and Stella tells a story, and if so what kind. This is a non-problem. The work chronicles a series of attempts to persuade. This is narrative of a sort, but of a peculiarly rhetorical sort. It stands halfway between life and literature and draws indiscriminately from both. Its protagonist is first fictional, then the real and historical Sir Philip Sidney. Both "story" ("real life") and consistent artistic metamorphosis of this ("persona," "pure poetry") enter in only as they serve a predominantly rhetorical purpose. Astrophil and Stella's mixture of fact and fancy makes perfect sense in its own terms. Only under the wrong formal expectations does it seem inconsistent.

Perhaps this is the moment to confront another famous and irrelevant problem--Sidney's sincerity. Sidney sincerely wants to persuade. His desire is sincerity itself. This he is obliged to tell us and, in the first four lines of 1, he does. All that comes after serves this purpose. He makes poetry out of his effort to find a "voice," to be sincere, but he makes poetry out of a good many other occasions and feelings and problems, too. We can quarrel with the end in view. Seduction, however fancy the language, may be wrong. But this has nothing to do with Sidney's "sincerity" in trying to bring it about. We can say that real love is sincere love and neither has anything to do with sex. Sidney would simply disagree, and we should have to kiss both Astrophil and Stella good-bye. We can say that, granted the end and the conception of love, Sidney was not justified in pretending to feelings he did not possess. He would reply that the force of desire to change--and fabricate--one's feelings was part of the story he was telling. Astrophil and Stella was about "sincerity." The only argument about the sincerity of Astrophil and Stella that might avail would be that he had not warned us about his rhetorical purpose. But he not only does this in the first four lines, he does it again and again. The force of desire is continually before our eyes. None of the charges will stand. Sincerity, except as a theme, is irrelevant to Astrophil and Stella, one of the non-problems that have plagued the poem.

Structure is just such another. The common denominator of critical examination and speculation of all the major sonnet-sequences, not just Sidney's, is a radical temptation to think, first, that the order of the sonnets is crucial and, second, that the traditional order is unsatisfactory. No other kind of poem quite so much draws out the critics' impulse to tinker and fiddle. Not that the impulse, much maligned, cannot be praised. Every professional reader of a sonnet-sequence is zealous, and rightly so, for a literary structure. He finds instead a rhetorical one, where order is considerably less important. He then makes it more important by taking as the arrangement what is only an arrangement, and thus keeps faith with his text and author. Or he takes the dilemma by the horns and rearranges. He has then kept faith with his sense of literary form, one which he thinks (again rightly) that Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare would share with him. He does only what exigent circumstance, and perhaps sloth, prevented their doing for themselves. What of the explanations for their not doing it themselves? Common ignorance defends my speculation as well as the next man's: they did not think order was crucial. Some groupings, yes. Such smaller groupings constituted a rhetorical gesture as it were. But the overall order, and even the order within the groupings, was not crucial. The sonnets were discrete entities. Sidney's aimed outward, at persuading Stella. Shakespeare's turned inward, posturing for les yeux internes. But each was a discrete attempt at integration (of one kind or another). One might play off or depart from another, or a group from a single incident, but all were not conceived as a whole.9

In Astrophil and Stella the case seems especially clear. The sonnets are weapons, discrete weapons, each conceived in the hope that it would be the last. The form as a whole had no persuasive function, could have none since it was built up seriatim, over time. For the same reason, it could have no ending in the literary sense of the word. It could simply stop, confess defeat. The beginning was indeed crucial, but it was a rhetorical not a literary beginning. It set up a vital context for the rhetoric to follow. This done, Sidney could let time and chance take care of the "structure" and there is every indication that he did so. The well-known desire to place 31 and 32 from Certain Sonnets at the end of Astrophil and Stella represents the desire for a literary ending rather than a rhetorical cessation. Sidney's predicament has got, somehow, to be solved. Or at least we must be brought to a position of rest. All of this comes from foisting an alien formal expectation on the poem.

The structures which we find, then, are our own. So long as we admit this, they are not necessarily any the less useful. They are exercises in what Murray Krieger calls "contextualism," and even when they manage to say very little of value about the sonnets, they can be valuable forcing-houses for critical theory. By looking at the sequence as a potential collection of many structures, an infinite

series of contexts, we can make of it an incredibly rich form.10 I see no reason why this kind of rearrangement should not be vigorously pursued. Lewis scoffs that "if you arrange things to make a story, then of course a story will result from your re-arrangement" (p. 328). But you can rearrange a sequence into many shapes besides a story, and whatever your shape, it will create more meanings for others than your own perspective allows you to see. This blindness to potential meaning the artist himself shares. And is not the kind of tentative rearrangement scholars like to work out for the sonnet-sequence really of the same kind as their effort to weave larger discrete works into a coherent pattern, into what we call literary history? Both are, to a large degree, aleatory, but none the worse for it.

If Astrophil and Stella is, in essence, a rhetorical artifact, it is also about rhetoric, and to this second concern we must now turn. The ground has been well explored by Young. He remarks of 74 ("I never dranke of Aganippe well") that "by going beyond the question of the particular illusion, the conventional manner, to illusion itself, this sonnet makes explicit an issue implicit in the others" (p. 9). He carries the observation an important step further: "What I have been trying to show is that there is an analogy between the technical problems presented by the literary convention and the dramatic problems presented by the love story, and that it is not an accidental one." There seems to be more than an analogy. Sidney wants to make of his love and his love-poetry one thing. Stella then becomes his muse, and her charms the sum of all that poets ever writ:

Let daintie wits crie on the Sisters nine,That bravely maskt, their fancies may be told:Or Pindare's Apes, flaunt they in phrases fine,Enam'ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold: Or else let them in statelier glorie shine,Ennobling new found Tropes with problemes old:Or with strange similies enrich each line,Of herbes or beastes, which Inde or Afrike hold. For me in sooth, no Muse but one I know: Phrases and Problemes from my reach do grow,And strange things cost too deare for my poore sprites. How then? even thus: in Stella's face I reed, What Love and Beautie be, then all my deedBut Copying is, what in her Nature writes.(3)

The logical goal of such a blending would be the obliteration of any distinction between matter and manner, between words and feelings. Stella then becomes a touchstone for the quality of experience both literary (as in 15) and everyday. And Sidney wishes

to disclaim any desire for experience or meaning she cannot represent. "Sonnet 28" might be better attended than it has been:

You that with allegorie's curious frame, Of other's children changelings use to make, With me those paines for God's sake do not take:I list not dig so deepe for brasen fame.When I say 'Stella', I do meane the same Princesse of Beautie, for whose only sake The raines of Love I love, though never slake,And joy therein, though Nations count it shame. I beg no subject to use eloquence,Nor in hid wayes to guide Philosophie:Looke at my hands for no such quintessence;But know that I in pure simplicitie, Breathe out the flames which burne within my heart, Love onely reading unto me this art.

The disclaimer to any larger meaning than expressing his love may be more important than his eloquent plea that he forswears eloquence. Words are to be forced into absolute coincidence with his desire, to do it full and final justice. Such full expression will be the most persuasive rhetoric of all.

This is one strand of Sidney's thinking about language. It must be like Stella herself, unique, uniquely expressive. But he introduces a complementary strand. Language can play the common drab: "What may words say, or what may words not say, / Where truth it selfe must speake like flatterie?" (35). Such language all the poets use. With them, words force feeling and not vice-versa. Does Sidney realize that this may happen to him, too? He would seem to in those sonnets where he imitates Petrarch or someone else in forswearing imitation, and thus for the knowing reader ironically acknowledges his final enslavements to words and the conventional uses of them. He might also be thought to touch on the point obliquely in 45 where he builds, on the contrast between Stella's cruelty to him and her tears at a fable, a couplet which ends, "I am not I, pitie the tale of me." This, in a sense, is what he does in the whole sequence. Sidney's use of his reflections on the powers of language works, then, both sides of the street. When he is direct, we are--and Stella is--to think this the real language, that coincident with real deeds, real feelings. When he is oblique and ironical, we are to think him using, while at the same time he sees through and derides, the stale clichés of the rest of the cosmos.

Rhetorically, this double strategy promises well. But if we try to tease from it a coherent set of reflections on language and the ways in which language both enriches and sets bounds to human

experience, we may be less successful. Look, for example, at one of the most striking sonnets in the sequence, 34:

Come let me write, 'And to what end?' To easeA burthned hart. 'How can words ease, which areThe glasses of thy dayly vexing care?'Oft cruell fights well pictured forth do please.'Art not asham'd to publish thy disease?' Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare: 'But will not wise men thinke thy words fond ware?'Then be they close, and so none shall displease. 'What idler thing, then speake and not be hard?'What harder thing then smart, and not to speak?Peace, foolish wit, with wit my wit is mard.Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreake My harmes on Ink's poore losse, perhaps some find Stella's great powrs, that so confuse my mind.

It is a very good poem indeed. Sidney's characteristic excellences, the perfectly paced, directly colloquial voice, which controls an elaborate word-play, the stichomythic interlocutor, the intense, self-conscious reflection upon what he is and what he is doing, the powerful closing: all show through. And yet, if we are considering Sidney as a philosopher of language (or of anything else) must we not come in the end to agree with the last line? He is confused. Even the syntax, he points out to us, starts to crumble in the couplet. Let me anticipate the objections. Poets can be confused and no worse for it. There is Yeats. They can, too, write beautiful poems about their confusion. But there is a larger issue involved. Style, thinking about language, is no small theme in Astrophil and Stella. Is the reader not entitled to know where he stands, what conception of language is really operating in the poem? And what relationship the deceptions of language really bear to human experience? "Sonnet 34" never tells us what the relation between strong feeling and the compulsion to express it really is. No more does the sequence as a whole. Sidney raises the point but does not resolve it. It may be, in the larger sense probably is, beyond resolution. But surely a consistent set even of implications would enrich the poem. Again one must invoke the poem's essentially rhetorical strategy to explain the deficiency. Sidney's thinking about language is a tool (the doubleedged sword of rhetoric), like his thinking about everything else, to be used not pondered.

So too it is with the proverbial popular wisdom. Sidney confronts it. He sees that it will not do. It is manifestly inadequate to cope with experience, as anyone can see when he simply juxtaposes the two, as in 5. But we cannot say that he transcends it. He confronts desire, he confronts the ambivalent, lying heart of language, but he goes beyond neither. Nor does he coherently relate them one to

another. These are fantastic objections, of course. Look what he does do. He makes of his own desire the great poetic representation of Desire in English. But because his purpose remains rhetorical throughout, he can neither anatomize desire, as Shakespeare does in "Sonnet 129," nor follow it through consummation into middle age, as Shakespeare does in 138. He cannot yoke desire and the censor in a brilliant philosophical pun, as Shakespeare's dazzling 135 does. Nor, of course, does Sidney attempt any of these Shakespearean purposes. Neither meditative nor philosophic, Astrophil and Stella begins and ends in the begging mode.