english love and desire in early modern england

8/12/2019 English Love and Desire in early modern england

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English Love and Desire assignment

Write a comparison between two poems treatment of love and desire, providinga detailed analysis of the poems language and the way that the experience of love and desire is

represented in the poems.

Your two poems should be by two different poets that we have studied in the

first section of the unit (i.e. Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Raleigh, Elizabeth I, Barnfield,

Shakespeare or Wroth) and should be chosen from the poems included in the

Broadview Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2: The Renaissance and the Early

Seventeenth Century. For those who do not possess the Broadview Anthology,

the poems included in it are listed at the end of this handout. If you wish, you are

also allowed to use the Raleigh poems distributed separately in class or one of

Shakespeares Sonnets that you might have worked on for the exercise in Tutorial 3.

Parameters

Feel free to use the preparation that you have done for each of the first three

tutorials, including what you discovered when doing word searches etc. You donot need to refer to secondary critical material in this assignment, but you may

do so if you find scholarship that helps enrich your account of the poems. All

sources should, as usual, be appropriately referenced.

In composing your answer you might like to consider some of the questions

below. This is only a list of suggestions, though, and not a checklist of what you

must include. On no account, try to answer them all! You decide how to frame your comparison in

the way you feel is best.

1. How do the poems make use of the Petrarchan tradition of a distant beloved,

addressed by an abject lover?

2. Do the poems share any common metaphors, similes or other aspects offigurative language?

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3. Do the poems make similar, or different, use of the structure of the sonnet?

4. How would you characterize the voice of the poems?

5. Is it possible to compare, or to differentiate, between their treatment of

gender, or of the relationship between and within gender groups?

6. Can the narratives of desire in these poems be understood as a way of

thinking about political engagement, disenchantment or ambition? A good

response to this question will:

Tips

get straight to specifics. We dont really want to see you starting with very general sentences like, A lot

of poems in the sixteenth century dealt with questions of love and desire. You dont have enough words to waste on

this kind of thing. Ask yourself, What is the main specific point about love and desire that I want to ta lk about

here? and try to get that into your opening.

have something specific to say about the way the two poems can be related to each other. Avoid generalities here

and try, instead, to find precise grounds for comparison.

pay close attention to themultiple ways in which words, and sets of words, are

deployed in the poems. There are all sorts of interpretive resources that you

might draw on in your attempt to understand this poetry. You can think about

metre, rhyme, metaphor, diction etc etc.. But don't include details for the sake ofit. Just because you have spotted an interesting formal effect, there is no need to


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include it in your account of the poem unless it contributes to the precise aspects

of the poem upon which your account is focusing.

not use dictionary definitions as determining the meaning of a word. In the

tutorials, we have been encouraging you to use the OED in a way that is more

productive than simply looking at what a word has to mean. Rather, it should

open out a history of specific, but multifarious and ever- changing ways in which

words have been used. It is to this variety that you should be aiming to attend,

rather than closing your options of

Sonnet 2 astrophil and stellaAstrophil describes himself as being a slave, helplessly overcome by love. Desire

is repressed somewhat, erotic desire in any case.

Sonnet two focuses on the passivity of the experience, of an experience removed

from the authors own control and instead being the victim of happenstance or, as

he refers to it, cupid. The imagery of cupid distances himself from his own

culpability. There are two opposing motifs at work in the sonnet, on the one

hand the common petrachan clich of love forcing him to take leave of his witsand reason.


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Falling in love is hell. Imagery of the cupid distances himself from responsibility.

Analysis 1

SONNET 2

In this sonnet, Astrophil gives us a brief account of how he fell in lovewith Stella. He uses the image of Cupid shooting him with his arrowthroughout the poem, and maintains a somewhat martial and woundedtone throughout. Cupids shot wounds him, but does not make him fallin love with Stella immediatelyHe describes falling in love from lines 58 in terms of a sort of battle in which he unwittingly surrenders. Hebecomes more of a prisoner of love. At length to Loves decrees, I,forced, agreed / Yet with repining at so partial lot. Falling in loveAstrophil presents as something that happens almost out of yourcontrol, causing you to suffer lost liberty, and being in love turns himinto a slave-borne Muscovite.

Analysis 2

Notice in the last couplets of the Sonnet, lines 11 14, how upside down isAstrophils world. He claims I call it praise to suffer tyranny, meaning heworships being under the cruel leadership of his love for Stella. And he employs

the remnant of my wit (his last bit of rationality) To make myself believe thatall is well / While with a feeling skill I paint my hell. He claims he now tries to

convince / fool himself that he is fine while in fact falling in love is hell.The yoking together of extreme terms in the first two sonnets is common

throughout Sidneys sonnets and the sonnet tradition. Notice in Sonnet 1 he talksabout how his pain might bring Stella pleasure. The spring sunburns hisbrain. In Sonnet 2, he praises to suffer tyranny, and makes himself believe allis well while I paint my hell. This tradition of oxymoron goes back to theearliest Italian sonnets, in particular, Petrarchs sonnet sequence concerning hisunrequited love for Laura. In these sonnets, she is firy ice, and cruelly kind,and all sorts of other contradictory things. Petrarch also established the classic

use of hyperbole in love sonnets and poems. Hyperbole means exaggerated

descriptions or comparisons, like claiming that your tears create floods, or your

woeful sighs stir up storms. Shakespeare, in sonnet 130, makes fun of thePetrachan conceit and hyperbole hysterically

This sonnet is, on the one hand, one of the simplest, commonest Petrarchan

clichslove has forced me to take leave of my wits and reason, but what can Ido?and, on the other, so clever and witty as to run the risk of being downrightobscure in its ambiguity.

Lets start with what is most clear and accessible. The sonnets idea is laid out ina 3-step outline, similar to the way Shakespeare makes a case in three quatrains,

except in this Italian sonnet the third section fills the sestet, and is furthersubdivided 3-3, Sidneys typical pattern (though, as discussed in my first post,


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with the hybrid couplet again evoking the Shakespearean pattern). The outlinereads: 1. General description of the problem; 2. shifting to I as the repeatedsubject of active verbs, a specific and succinct summary of how the speaker got

to where he is; and 3. Where he is now, subdivided (a) how he is characterized(a slave enamored of his own slavery); and (b) what he does about it (tries to

rationalize).

Three of the most striking, yet accessible, devices in the poem:

First, the over-punctuation in the second quatrain (to be fair, some of it

introduced by modern editing), forcing a halting rhythm that imitates a man

being dragged into something against his will. Notice, for example, breaks after

each of the first three feet in line 5, and then, when the two-syllable lovdstarts to make a smoother (and more optimistic) two-foot phrase, it comes

crashing to earth with not. Or the even more disruptive break in the middle of awould-

be iambic foot in line 7: if (by contrast) I forced were a simple subject-

verb phrase, the line would read simply d cres frced, but in this case, withforced as a past-participial postnominal modifier, the break forces a virtualspondee, d cres , frced; reader and speaker are, in effect, both stopped intheir tracks at the same time.

Second, the wonderfully quiet-but-dramatic transition from the end of the octave

to the start of the sestet. In line 8 the speaker retains some shred of his dignity as

he comes to the conclusion of the dragging process: Yet with repining at sopartial lot. Imagine here a man being locked in a cell, while still protesting hisinnocence to his jailer. But apparently, the jailer ignores him, clangs the bars

shut, and stalks off down an echoing hallway. The next poignant thought is: Noweven that footstep of lost liberty is gone. The prisoner is on his own to adjust tothe terms of his imprisonment, and typically (like the stereotypical Russian

under the Tsars) he will find a way to embrace it. The suddenly concrete image

of a footstep following the entirely abstract description of lines 5-8 is poetry at

its greatest.

Third, the humorous reference to the remnant of the speakers wit (line 12),when he has not yet explicitly mentioned losing his witan almost homespunjoke, but also a clever and understated way to double the meaning containedwithin an otherwise merely functional lead-in to an idea.

So where is the difficulty and the obscurity? Lines 3 and 14. The problems are

not closely related, and do not seriously undercut the simple pattern discussed

above, so I will just discuss them in isolation:

Line 3: The subject phrase known worth is itself a bit of a pauser, and mayrequire the footnote information that this is an autobiographical reference to the

fact that Sidney knew a great deal about Penelope Devereux before he

considered her a love interest, but even without that knowledge, the phrase is a

reasonably clear opposite to love at first sight or the dribbed (i.e., mistaken

or misfired) shot of Cupids arrow mentioned in line 1. But the real puzzler is theadverbial phrase in the middle of the verb phrase, in mine of time. The first


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instinct, given all the self-preoccupation here, might be to think mine is thepossessive meaning my wound, as in: Love breaks some hearts, but has utterlysmashed mine. But that instinct can be quickly dismissed: looking backward,the wound in line 2 was already mine, so saying mine in a But clausewould be clumsy; and looking forward, the wound is certainly not the object of

had full conquest got; the speaker is, and indeed the wound is the instrumentof the speakers defeat. The word conquest, in fact, is the key clue here.Conquest of a fortified city was as likely to be attempted by mining (= tunnelingunder the wall, hence our modern abstract term undermining) as by directassault, though the latter was certainly more honorable and more likely to be

admired. This is part of the point for the dashing soldier Sidney: Love has, in

effect, gotten to him by underhanded, sneaky means, when he wasnt properlyarmed against it. So the in mine part of the phrase has nothing to do with apossessive, but refers to the method by which Love has used known worth togain the conquest. But that still leaves the seemingly simple phrase of time,which to me is just as hard to sort out. Is it connected

to proceed, meaningsomething as simple as in time proceed? If so, why not say in time proceed,since the meter is the same and of time is not idiomatic for in time? Is it,alternatively, connected to mine, so that time is the entity that is actually beingmined? That, too, does not make sense, since time is surely a winner not aloser in the construction that follows. So lets try this: its connected to mine,but the of indicates ownership, so mining is Times instrument for furtheringthe cause of Love; now that makes more sense, does it not? But it is hardly an

intuitive reading!

Line 14: The general sense of the final couplet is a paradox similar to

Shakespeares I do believe her though I know she lies, only here the idea is Ido believe me though I know Im crazy. The somewhat hard part is theapparent paradox-within-a-paradox of While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.I think it is safe to say that feeling skill is an oxymoron, reflecting the sameclash between passion and personal control that is a running theme of the whole

sonnet sequence. But what, exactly, is the speaker doing with his passion-

affected intellect?; what does it mean to paint my hell? There are at least twodistinct possibilities, and in this case I think we do well to accept both, and thus

enrich the poems meaning through ambiguity; as Benedick says, Theres adouble meaning in that! Duncan-Joness endnote opts for Hamletsunderstanding of paint as giving a false colouring or complexionto, or in thecrude American political vernacular, putting lipstick on a pig. So in that sense,the speaker admits to using optimistic descriptions of a love relationship to

pretty up what is really a hellish state he has gotten into. It could similarly besaid that line 5 of Sonnet 1, I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woerefers to putting false make-up on an ugly face (blackness being equated with

ugliness in Renaissance-speak). But just as clearly, that line occurs in the midst of

a description of the struggle to create art, so it carries the ambiguity of paint ascreate art. The verb is used in this sense in several other sonnets (70, 81, 93,98), unambiguously so in 81 (for example), where the speaker seeks to paintpoetically a kiss he has received from Stella. So, the simple end of what is

already a complex ideaI am deluding myself and putting a false front on ahellish situationis given still more complexity, depth, and meaning with the


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layered suggestions (extending Sonnet 1s role as preface to a lengthy sonnetsequence) that (1) the hellish situation is about to be turned into a work of art;

and (2) (as Marlowe, Milton, and other writers have variously affirmed), hell isa place between a pair of human ears, and the hell the speaker has describedhimself as being reluctantly dragged into is in fact a hell of his own making.

Thomas Wyatt sonnet 10

Shakespeare shall I compare thee to a summers day

english love and desire in early modern england

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