Astrophel and Stella
The fifth sonnet of Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella does the piece justice, maintaining the intricacy and the nuance of the whole. Instead of taking great pains to appear ‘effortless’ and ‘natural’ as popular in the Renaissance idiom, this poem is one that draws attention to the labour of its construction in order to draw attention to the very artificial and practiced aspect of even the most apparently natural construct. This subversion allows for a unique and critical reading of the verse that helps to reveal the narrator’s concerns beyond his love for Stella. Among these concerns is the concept of truth and the insecurity that such a definitive term can capture and how this impacts the poem’s imagining of itself as art.
The fifth sonnet of Astrophel and Stella is one that demands that attention be paid to its construction if one is to fully understand the speaker’s predicament. It does not adhere to the typical form of the love poem, but its departures from the prototypical, rather than being distracting, are useful when teasing out its meaning. Firstly, the muse of the poem, the unobtainable, unequivocal Stella, is not mentioned until the poem’s final line. The oddity of Stella’s late appearance is increased by the fact that Astrophel’s love for Stella seems to be set up in direct contention with the rest of the poem’s ‘truths’, “True, and yet true that I must Stella love”. For readers of poetry, this “yet” serves as a turn in the poem, or a volta, that would often signal its resolution. Its placement in the very final line leaves the poem with an unbalanced, lopsided structure. Instead of appearing haphazard, this lopsidedness reads as Astrophel’s attempt to demonstrate that the truth of his love for Stella is as weighty and significant as the grandiose, meticulously- shaped metaphors to which she is set in opposition. This equality has an almost physical representation in the poem if one were to imagine the volta as the poem’s folcrum, with almost the entire poem weighing down on one side and with only his love for Stella exerting power on the other, maintaining balance.
This separation is significant also as Astrophel seems to suggest that his love for Stella persists in spite of the truths he expounds through his use of metaphors. This provokes the reader to seek out other differences between these acclaimed ‘truths’, particularly the manner in which each metaphor seems to stratify human agency and beauty below those of nature or of the divine. While the human who defies nature by following his physical senses instead of reason (here imbued with a touch of the divine) is sure to suffer a “smart” (4); the fool who dares to carve his own image of Cupid’s dart is sure to be starved ‘truths’ by a ‘good god’ (8); and while the human is a mere, unimpressive vessel that must die if it hopes to see true beauty (10/13), Astrophel’s love for Stella is an assertion of human capacity for love, beauty and sensation that unapologetically rebels against the widely-accepted maxims which seek to modify his person, his behavior and his emotions. Refusing to be underwhelmed by the immensity of his love, Astrophel has constructed a verse which, in its very construction, exhibits a human capacity to feel and to create so great that it arguably adds a touch of irony to his initial ‘truths’, especially as these are the truths he chooses to describe so artfully and with such particular care. The very use of metaphor thus becomes an important aspect of the poem’s structure, greatly influencing one’s interpretation of Astrophel’s words. An appreciation for the poem’s intentional use of structure is crucial to understand the verse in its entirety.
Even the most casual reading of this poem would have the reader understand that it is not merely a somber message of love, but that it has an interest in the concept of truth, particularly as it pertains to art and beauty. In fact, the repetition of the word truth is not merely a way of unifying the poem, rather the nature of truth is crucial to the poem’s relationship to art. The word “true” which is used to introduce each new metaphor throughout the verse not only invokes the sense of factuality, but also, as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, a sense of “constancy” (Oxford English Dictionary). The deceptive complexity of this word is immediately brought into focus as Astrophel states in this verse that both his love for Stella and everything that deems his love for Stella worthless have a claim to ‘truth’. Clearly, the “constancy” that is truth has been compromised in this poem and the word’s significance has been opened for wider interpretation. The truths which Astrophel initially discusses seem to represent a semantic, objective knowledge of the world and its workings while his love for Stella is the subjective truth which throws the legitimacy of those “facts” into question. This subjective truth is quite literally essential to his being, it is a part of who he is, even a translation of his name deems him “lover of Stella”. Truth is no longer a constant, but rather it is presented as something which wavers, which must be detangled from the notions of the mind and the heart. As discussed before, there is reason to doubt the complete sincerity of these truths, and perhaps there is another useful tension developing in the repeated use of word which at once suggests a fact and a question.
Throughout the verse’s metaphors there is a vein of distrust towards creativity and aesthetic enjoyment, as the eyes are described as mere servants to reason which should serve no other purpose (1), the man-made image of Cupid’s arrow is a foolishly danger (6/8) and any worldly beauty is a fleeting shadow of heaven’s perfection (10). Interestingly, this distrust of beauty is being expressed within a poem, a poem which takes great pains to draw attention to the art and labour of its metaphors. It is possible that the very creative ‘beauty’ of the poem is intended to align it with that aesthetic, secular beauty which is not to be trusted and that the poem is trying to cue its readers to the instability of ‘truth’ and the manner in which Astrophel’s love of Stella has rattled the word empty of meaning and made him suspicious of the very word truth. Finally, if Astrophel’s intention is to throw his use of the word truth into suspicion, what can the reader understand of his claim that virtue is true beauty (9)? Is Astrophel subtly doubting that there is a singular ‘true’ beauty, and thus no need to disparage the beauty of his beloved merely because she was of mere “mortal mixture” made?
This verse expresses not only an anxiety at the instability of truth, but also at the threat that humans face of succumbing to a notion that truth is inherent, unchanging and unchangeable. Simultaneously, however, the verse is one that asserts the human potential to construct truth and beauty, not only within the lines themselves but in the fact that Astrophel is constructing the very lines that the reader is seeing, constructing his own truth and his own world within art. In asking the reader to “read” the value in its construction, this verse is able to draw attention to its value as art, as a project through which security and stability can be imagined and created. Even in a world where life is highly regulated and systematized and where merely propagating certain truths can determine your value, there is the space and the potential for resistance, wherein lies Astrophel’s love of Stella.
Works Cited
"Definition of Truth in English." Truth: Definition of Truth in Oxford Dictionary (British & World English). Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2013. Web. 27 Oct. 2013.
Sidney, Philip. "Astrophel and Stella." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Vol. B. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 1085-086. Print.
