Alexander Shurbanov

Shakespeare's Proleptic Refashioning of the Renaissance Sonnet

It is a well known fact that Shakespeare's greatness derives from both his belonging to the age of
the Renaissance and his ability to extricate himself from the bounds of a single period, however
exceptional, and become “a man of all time”. This ambivalence can explain the sweep of his
poetic vision, his existential and artistic wisdom, his profound knowledge of human nature in its
multifarious manifestations. And it underlies his complex dealings with the received forms of
literature, which combine acceptance and complete mastering with incessant problematization
and transformation. As Rosalie Colie has observed, “his interest in the traditional aspects of his
art lay precisely in their problematic nature, not in their stereotypical force.”1

The Sonnets of William Shakespeare, no less than his plays, are markedly innovative, while
remaining in the context of the celebrated Petrarchan mould. They introduce a new, much more
intricate understanding of love and its complexities in a real human world; they dramatize the
lyrical genre of the sonnet sequence by increasing the number of its characters and elaborating
both their personal constitutions and their interactions, woven into a full-fledged plot that leads
from an innocent Platonic friendship to the dark tragedy of an erotic chaos. This, of course,
amounts to a transcendence of established generic boundaries.2 The expressive means which the
poet uses in many of his works are also an inextricable combination of traditionalism and bold
experimentation. What I would like to explore in this essay is how Shakespeare tackled the
standard form of the Renaissance sonnet as an individual poem and in what direction he tried to
push it.

To start with, let us attempt to formulate broadly this standard form, however odious
generalizations may indeed be. The Petrarchan sonnet, as imported and developed in sixteenth-
century England, was a lyrical poem expressing emotional states of mind in what nowadays
strikes us as a fairly rigid rationalized structure. Most of its representative pieces would open
with a statement of the poem's topic or thesis; the body of the sonnet would then be taken up by a
series of illustrations of this topic, followed by an aphoristic conclusion or a twist-in-the-tail

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rejection of the initially defined thesis. Alternatively, we can have a sonnet introducing some
kind of a fictional (most often allegorical) situation that would further be detailed in a number of
components or developed through a sequence of phases, again reaching a logical or narrative
round-up with a formulated moral at the end. In both types, the poem falls into three sections: (1)
introductory, ushering the reader into its subject matter; (2) central, unfolding the details of the
subject matter; (3) closing, which presents a logical conclusion of the argument, a resolution of
the problem, or the outcome of a completed story. Not unlike the sonnet sequences of his
contemporaries, Shakespeare's Sonnets offer many examples of these well-established types. In a
few rather exceptional pieces, however, he departs in interesting ways from the norm of his age,
breaking new grounds for the further evolution of European poetry. Our attention in what follows
will be focused on a few of these innovative pieces.

Let us begin with the argumentative type of sonnet, which can be said to predominate in
Shakespeare's sequence. The subject matter of these poems is usually structured in the standard
way: thesis – illustrations/ or consecutive stages of the argument – conclusion. The conclusion is
quite often set in opposition to what has been said so far in the poem. This turnabout, however,
may come much earlier on, in the 9th or even in the 5th line. Also, some of the sonnets do not spell
out their theses at all and let them be guessed from the heap of illustrations; others defer them
until the very end and finally merge them with the conclusions in an overall periodic-sentence
structure.

There is at least one sonnet in Shakespeare's sequence that can exemplify the unadulterated form
of the argumentative type, which is fairly common in the sequences of other contemporary poets
but rather uncharacteristic of his own work in this basic form. It is Sonnet 53:

What is your substance, whereof are you made,

That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend:
Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you;

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 On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,
And you in Grecian tires are painted new;
Speak of the spring and foison of the year:
The one doth shadow of your beauty show,
The other as your bounty doth appear,
And you in every blessèd shape we know.
In all eternal grace you have some part,
But you like none, none you, for constant heart.3

The functional tasks of the first quatrain as introduction, the next two as illustrations, and the
final couplet as a conclusion are quite obviously kept within the limits of the respective sections
without any overlaps. The structure here is at its neatest, almost like a logical exercise.

Now set Sonnet 73 side by side with it and mark both the structural similarity and the strikingly
different impacts of the two pieces:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twighlight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

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At first glance, Sonnet 73 is almost as good an example of the familiar Renaissance sonnet
variety conforming to the thesis–illustrations–conclusion ratiocinative pattern as strictly as
Sonnet 53. The thesis here is the advanced age of the Poet and his imminent separation from the
Friend, who is the addressee of the largest number of sonnets in the sequence. What follows are
three independent illustrations, consisting of visual imagery and exemplifying the technique of
Renaissance “amplification”.4 The closing couplet offers the dubious consolation that the brevity
of earthly happiness can only add to its preciousness and should prompt us to make the most of it
while it lasts – a Neo-Platonist modification of the ancient carpe diem hedonism.5

This scheme, however, does not probe too deep beneath the surface, and the reader’s
comprehension is conducted along an entirely different route. We get a glimpse of the thesis in
the introductory statement, but it is not completed there – instead we have to surmise its full
meaning from the first lines of the successive quatrains, as they harp again and again on the same
vague idea through a series of nearly identical variants of the phrase: “In me thou see’st… ” Each
of these opening statements is ensued by a visual picture, which the poet has already defined as
no more than an analogue for the persona’s state of mind. In spite of that, the landscape views are
so palpably vivid that it is hard to take them for mere allegories. As it were, they are at the same
time in the Poet and around him, an image both of his inner self and of his environment. The
world of nature becomes an extension of the individual, while the individual in turn becomes the
focus of all nature. This effect is not achieved simply through the statement about the link
between man and nature (“In me thou see’st…”) but also, and perhaps much more effectively,
through the subtle intertwining of tropic details. Let us see how this is done.

The first quatrain presents an autumn picture, a glimpse of the season that, we are told, reigns in
the Poet’s life:

That time of year thou may’st in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold…

An almost imperceptible detail humanizes the boughs in these lines: it is not the wind, as one

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might expect, but the cold that makes them shake, an effect that temperature can only have on a
animate being. The closing fourth line likens the defoliated branches to “bare ruin’d choirs”
abandoned by their choristers. The traditional ornaments of church choirs, abounding in bird and
vegetation symbols, must have rendered the visual connection between the trees and the sacred
ruins quite natural for Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the wake of the dissolution of
monasteries completed a few decades earlier. In this superbly economical way, an organic fusion
is achieved of the vegetative and the architectural, the animate and the inanimate, the natural and
the human. Moreover, both the trees and the destroyed temples seem to have been lately deserted
by their choristers, and the ambiguous syntax, in combination with the condensed imagery, does
not make it quite clear whether the “sweet birds” have sung in the trees only or amidst the
demolished buildings too. Feathery and human choristers have become virtually
indistinguishable from one another. The emotional effect of the bare boughs and that of the ruins
are in any case so similar in their melancholy hopelessness and vacancy, that the half-simile/
half-metaphor merges into the overall setting, the landscape, in which through the dry tangle of
the autumn trees one catches a glimpse of decayed edifices that have once been grand and lofty.

The first quatrain, then, introduces us into a world – metaphorical yet real – that is forsaken by
all life, material and spiritual alike, and left with a few pitiful and fleeting reminders of the one-
time luscious lavishness of summer. Then follows the second quatrain, which compares the
Poet’s state with the afterglow of the evening, “Which by and by black night doth take away.”
Night here is vaguely humanized through its action, and in the fourth line it turns into an
anthropomorphic shadow of Death, a kind of good landlord locking and sealing his earthly
dominions.

The third quatrain brings in a new analogue for the Poet’s inner state. This time it is “the glowing
of such fire/ That on the ashes of his youth doth lie/ As the death-bed whereon it must expire/
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.” Even more than the night in the preceding
section, the fire is humanized by a host of metaphorical details (“his youth”, “death-bed”,
“nourished”, as well as by the more ambivalent “doth lie” and “must expire”).6 This perfect blend
of tropic and descriptive elements makes it impossible to disentangle the inanimate tenor from
the animate vehicle, and the whole image in its turn is related to a deeper-lying animate figure,

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that of the Poet’s self.

In the final analysis, we observe in this poem three “speaking pictures”, as they would have been
called in Shakespeare’s days, three extended metaphors conveying the speaker’s state of mind.
But, as has already been pointed out, they are so vivid and fascinating on their own, that we
cannot help accepting them at the same time as three actual landscape sketches “from nature”.
What makes it even more interesting is that, thanks to their common natural context, their spatial
compatibility, and their common atmosphere, the feeling of sad resignation in the face of the
inevitable, these three pictures flow easily into one in the same way as the two components of the
boughs-ruins simile were seen to merge in the first quatrain. As we read the sonnet, we are made
conscious of the gradual unfolding of an autumn setting. The first impression is that of the cold
emptiness harbouring the remains of the formerly proud temples among the bare branches.
Superimposed on it is the afterglow of the sunset gradually transformed into dusk and night (a
smooth transition effected through lines 5-6-7). And finally, as the last glimmer of the fading
daylight lingering here on earth, we see the fire flickering beneath its suffocating ashes, a fire
that has been deserted by an unidentified traveller, now vanishing into the gathering darkness.

This pervasive hopelessness is underlined by the inclusion of the Poet in the irreversible natural
cycle, by the lack of distance between him and his environment, into which his existence
dissolves to the point of complete extinction. It is an impression that is not stated but
communicated directly to our senses, imagination and emotions mainly through the animate-
inanimate metaphors-descriptions composed within a single melancholic tonality. And through
the rhythm of the poem too. The niceties of this rhythm are a topic in themselves, but it will
suffice for our purposes to mention one interesting detail. Every quatrain in the sonnet not only
opens but also closes in a nearly identical way. Its single sentence is logically completed by the
end of the third line, and then the fourth is appended without any syntactical link, monotonous
and interminable like a dejected protraction of something already exhausted, rather like the
heaving of a dejected sigh.

In a word, all structural levels in Sonnet 73 – argument, imagery, sound, rhythm – help to
engender or re-enforce the sense of languid resignation. The suggestion of death’s “naturalness”

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is bound to bring about such an attitude. Thus the conclusion that the sad truth of the imminent
loss perceived by the Friend must make his love “more strong,/ To love that well which [he] must
leave ere long”, is masterfully prepared for in the sphere of emotion. The idea has ripened in the
experience and not in the course of a logical argument. The wisdom of the heart precedes that of
the mind. In this way, working within the seemingly unimpaired traditional sonnet scheme,
Shakespeare has transformed the genre into what can be seen as its opposite: loosely speaking, it
has evolved from a theorem-like rational exercise (exemplified by Sonnet 53) into a new kind of
intensely atmospheric, emotionally contagious poem.

The affective blurring of the divisions between the quatrains, in spite of their formal
independence, accentuated by the insistent anaphora and the similarity of syntactic structure,
creates the necessary conditions for the ultimate fusion of the poem's components into an
indivisible whole. In effect, this is a tacit transition from the Renaissance artistic model, based on
the coordination of clearly articulated independent, self-contained elements, to the irreducible
organic unity of Baroque form.7

Another remarkable Shakespearean sonnet, 129, offers a more advanced example of the
achievement of this undifferentiated unity:

Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,
Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream.

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 All this the world well knows yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

This poem is so vehement in its passionate meditation on the power of the erotic instinct, that it
overturns all traditional barriers of the sonnet form and in one sweeping movement carries the
reader from beginning to end through the disorderly eddies and whirlpools of troubled thought.
Shakespeare is the author of a good many sonnets given to passionate argument on important
topics. But they always take care to adhere to their stanzaic structure, tossing and reshuffling it at
times, but never, except in this case, subjecting it to an almost unrestrained flux of feelings. What
still holds this powerful emotive wave within bounds is, of course, the unimpaired rhyming
scheme and the final point of rest to which it comes in the closing couplet. Helen Vendler has
suggested some additional elements of structural organization on the lexico-semantic level,8 but I
do not find them very prominent, even if they do exist, which remains a moot point.

Without such precedents Milton would hardly have been able to render Satan's tempestuous
journey across Chaos through the following similar verbal avalanche:

… so eagerly the fiend

O'er bog or steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings or feet pursues his way,
And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies...
(Paradise Lost, Book II, 947-50)9

What is perhaps more important, without Shakespeare's daring refashioning of the sonnet,
Milton's own important expansion of the potentials of this genre would have been much more
difficult to accomplish. His majestic sweep subjecting the entire frame of the poem to a single
vehement movement unhampered by formal divisions has a reliable precursor in Shakespeare's
129. And, of course, both Shakespeare's and Milton's decisive thrusts in this direction opened the
way to the further permutations and diversification of the genre in the hands of the English
Romantic poets and their successors all the way down to Robert Lowell.10

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If we now turn to the second type of sonnet, dealing with a situation which develops into
something like a narrative, we should say that there are at least half a dozen such pieces in
Shakespeare's sequence. Some of them, in fact, are hybrids between the story type and the
argument type, since the story is either an illustration or a basis for the logical evolution of a
thesis. Most of these stories are allegorical or emblematic for a human relationship or for a state
of mind, without any direct connection to events of physical actuality. They belong to a subtype
of Renaissance sonnets, present in many sequences of the time, the relation of fantastic anecdotes
involving mythological or legendary figures.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 50 can be said to belong to this group and yet, as we are going to see, it is
markedly different from its more typical representatives:

How heavy do I journey on the way,

When what I seek `my weary travel's end~
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,
“Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend.”
The beast that bears me, tirèd with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on,
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind:
My grief lies onward and my joy behind.

The opening line of this poem ushers us directly into the midst of a scene unfolding before our
eyes. The Poet has mounted his horse and is riding away from his Friend under the compulsion
of some urgent necessity, which is left tantalizingly unclear. The very sound of the first two
words (“How heavy”) with their emphatic aspirates resembles a sigh of grief and dismay. The

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phonetics of the second line (“When what I seek, my weary travel’s end”), with its triple
recurrence of the labial semi-vowel [w] intermingled with the whining [i:] assonance, strengthens
this sense of hopelessness and pain.

The second quatrain concentrates on the figure of the horse, which is vaguely referred to as “the
beast”, thus sustaining the atmosphere of obscurity and the melancholic dullness of the senses.
Horse and horseman seem to merge into a single organism. The animal is directly affected by its
master’s state (“tired with my woe”) and it “plods dully on” carrying the Poet away from his joy.
Some instinct makes the irrational creature partake of the rider’s frame of mind and enact his
inner urges.

And now, in the beginning of the third quatrain, we are stunned by the sinister flash of the
“bloody spur” which “anger thrusts into his hide”. This is a striking psychological detail
characteristic of Shakespeare’s drama at its best. The horseman’s inability to alter the course of
events results in a momentary exasperation and rancour, directed at what is nearest to hand. Thus
the innocent sympathetic creature suffers an undeserved rigour. What is more, as already pointed
out, this living being is a constituent part of the complex horseman-and-horse compound and so
the anger’s cruel and senseless blows afflict equally the soul of the Poet. The animal’s almost
human groan (its inarticulateness conveys deftly the ineffable depth of anguish) is more
harrowing for the rider than the spur has been for the horse: “More sharp to me than spurring to
his side”. We sense at this point that the impulse of unwarranted violence is followed on its heels
by heartfelt remorse.

It is apparent that Shakespeare presents to us a state of mind in its actual, material form – not as a
conventional sonnet allegory, but as a palpable dramatic scene. Instead of describing the pains of
parting, instead of cataloguing and analysing them in the way most contemporary sonneteers
would do, he makes us experience them in their fullness together with his lyrical persona.
Compared with a similar picture in Sir Philip Sidney’s sequence Astrophel and Stella (XLIX),
this sonnet reveals the indisputable boundary between the traditional and untraditional methods
in the lyrical poetry of the age:

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 I on my horse, and Love on me doth trie
Our horsemanships, while my strange worke I prove
A horseman to my horse, a horse to Love;
And now man's wrongs in me, poor beast, descrie.
The raines wherewith my Rider doth me tie
Are humbled thoughts, which bits of Reverence move,
Curb'd in with feare, but with guilt bosse above
Of Hope, which makes it seeme faire to the eye.
The Wand is Will; thou Fancie, Saddle art,
Girt fast by memorie, and while I spurre
My horse, he spurres with sharp desire my hart:
He sits me fast, how ever I do sturre;
And now hath made me to his hand so right,
That in the Manage myselfe takes delight.11

Just like Shakespeare's Poet, Sidney’s Astrophel is also seen on horseback and is also on the
road, but while he is riding his horse, Cupid in turn rides him, and the three figures are
journeying together through an allegorical land, so strikingly different from Shakespeare’s real
and intricate psychological world. Cupid has tied his horse (i.e. the lyrical persona) with the reins
of humbled thoughts, moving the bit of Reverence, that is held in place by Fear bossed over with
golden Hope, “which makes it seeme faire to the eye.” The god’s whip is Astrophel’s sexual
desire (“The Wand is Will”) and the saddle is his Fancy, fastened tight by memory. While the
speaker spurs his horse, he is himself spurred in the heart “with sharp desire” by Cupid. The god
of love is well mounted and will not loosen his grip on his poor victim. In the end, Astrophel
becomes so used to his sore plight that he begins to find masochistic pleasure in it, a queer
reversal in his attitude, which we are informed about as early as the second sonnet of the
sequence.12

The analogy between Sidney 49 and Shakespeare 50 is obvious. Shakespeare probably knew the
earlier sonnet13 and chose to play upon some of its details, especially the double spurring in the
flesh and the spirit. But it is precisely this proximity that brings out so sharply the radical

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difference between the two approaches. The state of mind depicted by Sidney is not simpler than
that in Shakespeare, neither is it less probable, but it is explicated, described, classified by
traditional allegorical means. We are informed about it rather than affected by the breathing
reality of an observed experience. Sidney has written – within the well-tried Petrarchan mode – a
poem extracting “the pure essence” of the psychological moment.14 Shakespeare enacts this
moment theatrically: in its living unity of flesh and spirit.

The closing section of Sonnet 50 shows how unprepared the genre still was for this kind of
“immediate”, unrationalized poetry. The couplet contains a superfluous explanation concerning
the cause of the state we have witnessed. This is the logical conclusion, the summing-up that is
so indispensable for the argumentative short lyric of the Renaissance, but absolutely redundant in
a poem of the new empirical type.

It is interesting that fairly long after Shakespeare, with George Herbert’s sonnet “Christmas”,15
we come back to the domain of good old allegory, on a religious plane this time, where the
horseman is the soul and the horse is the body of a single living being travelling after the turmoil
of life towards God’s restful inn:

All after pleasures as I rid one day,

My horse and I, both tired, body and mind,
With full cry of affections, quite astray;
I took up in the next inn I could find.

There when I came, whom found I but my dear,

My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief
Of pleasures brought me to Him, ready there
To be all passengers' most sweet relief.

O Thou whose glorious yet contracted light,

Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger;
Since my dark soul and brutish is Thy right,

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 To Man of all beasts be not Thou a stranger:

Furnish and deck my soul, that Thou may'st have

A better lodging than a rack or grave.16

Shakespeare’s radical empiricism could not even find true imitators in his age. The shift of
approach in his sonnets makes his work at times sound like an anticipation of our contemporary
post-Romantic poetry. Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, one of the
most representative twentieth-century poems, is as appropriate an example as any other to place
side by side with Sidney's and Herbert's equestrian sonnets on one side and Shakespeare’s on the
other:

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bell a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.17

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Once again we experience here the exciting rapport between the persona and his horse, the
human and the non-human, opening a perspective at existence that is much larger and less easily
encompassable than the domain of mere rationality. Once again an emotional state is allowed to
suffuse us in its element and leave us face to face with a world difficult, perhaps even impossible,
to define in logical terms and therefore greater and more exciting than any construction of our
minds may be. And we become aware that, almost miraculously, some four centuries ago, a Poet
had already paved the way towards such lyrical expanses.

Of course, Shakespeare's change of direction is not so marked in the remaining sonnets of the
sequence. It can be even maintained that the poems I have chosen to discuss here are in a way
exceptional and are indeed surrounded by other, much more conventional pieces. What is more,
even they evince a combination of the new and the old, amounting to an inability to disown the
tradition-hallowed strictly rational scheme of the genre. But they are nonetheless symptomatic of
a process that can be traced, though to a lesser degree, in the entire collection to which they
belong, and that can be said to define the most important tendency in Shakespeare's refashioning
of lyrical poetry at the dawn of modern time.

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1
Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 15.
2
I have studied these parameters of Shakespeare's sequence in my book Renaissance Humanism and Shakespeare's
Lyrical Poetry (Ренесансовият хуманизъм и лириката на Шекспир), Sofia: Naouka i izkustvo, 1980.
3
Shakespeare's sonnets in this essay are invariably quoted from Helen Vendler's authoritatve The Art of Shakespeare's
Sonnets, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, 1997.
4
George Puttenham's term in his Arte of English Poesie (1589).
5
This attitude should be compared to the much more traditional tackling of the theme in Samuel Daniel's To Delia
sonnets, for instance.
6
Stephen Booth makes the following important note to Shakespeare's linguistic choices in this fire image: “In sixteenth-
century English “his” was still often used, as it was in earlier English, as a possessive form of the neuter pronoun “it,”,
but, since it was already usual to use “its” and “his” as they are used in later English, his does tend to personify the fire
and, thus, collaborates with youth and death bed [line 11] to cause the tenor [a human life] to overwhelm the metaphor [a
fire]” (Shakespeare's Sonnets, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 259-260.
7
On this structural distinction between Renaissance and Baroque artistic visions and styles see Heinrich Wölfflin's
Renaissance und Barock (1888), in the English language translation of Kathrin Simon, Renaissance and Baroque,
Collins, 1964, p. 85, as well as Marco Mincoff's application of Wölfflin's categories to English literature in his study
Baroque Literature in England, Annuaire de l'Université de Sofia, Tome XLIII, 1946/47, p. 46.
8
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, pp. 550-554.
9
Quoted from John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Alastair Fowler, London: Longman, 1971, p. 134.
10
Lowell is the author of an impressive number of sonnets, unconventional in both subject matter and form.
11
From Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. by Maurice Evans, London, Melbourne and Toronto: Dent, 1977, p.21.
12
I call it praise to suffer Tyrannie
And now employ the remnant of my wit
To make my selfe beleeve that all is well...
13
Three (unauthorised) printed versions of Astrophel and Stella appeared simultaneously in 1591 and the sequence was
included in Sidney’s collected works in 1598.
14
To be fair to Sidney, he is perhaps the last Elizabethan poet, Shakespeare excluded, to be accused of conservatism and
lack of experimental daring. His apostrophe to the pet sparrow in Astrophel and Stella 83 (“Good brother Philip, I have
borne you long...”) can in fact be said to be of much the same kind as Shakespeare 50. The situation seems to have been
extracted from real life and the speaker's emotional attitude to the bird is obvious. But we shall look in vain here for the
psychological intricacy of Shakespeare's sonnet.
15
George Herbert’s English poems were first printed under the title The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations
in the year of their author’d death, 1633.
16
The Works of George Herbert, London: Frederick Warne and Co., pp. 131-132.
17
The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, New York, Chicago, San Francisco:Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1969, pp. 224-225.