from Astrophil and Stella, “Sonnet 59”

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

Sir Philip Sidney was one of the brightest stars of the sixteenth century. Combining raging good looks, innate wit, and a knack for diplomacy, he was the Elizabethan courtier extraordinaire. In 1586, his thirty-second year, Sidney was killed heroically in battle, thereby solidifying his legend. Yet despite his short life, Sidney wrote a number of masterpieces, including the first sonnet sequence in English and the most influential book of literary theory of his century. For over a hundred years following his death, Sidney was considered a finer poet than either Spenser or Shakespeare; most of that fame derives from the Astrophil and Stella sonnets, one of which appears in the following excerpt.

The sonnet in question is neither the best nor most famous of the sequence of 108, but it is definitely the bawdiest. Even those unused to reading poetry will have no trouble getting the gist of this one: Sidney is jealous of the attention his desired lover is paying to her lapdog, so he starts enumerating the many advantages he has over her “sour-breath’d mate.” Yet this is no ordinary spaniel! To my mischievous eye, the question remains: Is “that lap” of line 10 doing the lapping or being lapped? And where are the “sugar’d lips”? Not that I have a dirty mind or anything, but I suspect that what begins as an innocent poem about a furry little companion seems to develop into a decidedly scurrilous account of Sidney’s all-too-successful rival. By the end we find Sidney asking to be lobotomized by love, for as his lover loves only fools, this is the surest way to her heart. No small amount of rancor for fourteen rhyming lines.

Dear, why make you more of a dog than me?
If he do love, I burn, I burn in love;
If he wait well, I never thence would move;
If he be fair, yet but a dog can be.

Little he is, so little worth is he;
He barks, my songs in one voice oft doth prove:
Bidden perhaps he fetcheth thee a glove,
But I unbid, fetch even my soul to thee.

Yet while I languish, him that bosom clips,
That lap doth lap, nay lets in spite of spite
This sour-breath’d mate taste of those sugar’d lips.

Alas, if you grant only such delight
To witless things, then Love I hope (since wit
Becomes a clog) will soon ease me of it.