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In the octaves of each sonnet, the thematic development of love resembles those
found in Petrarchan poetray. In Sonnet 2 the octave presents the stereotype of a
passive lover, at the mercy of personified love. Love is forceful and unexpected, the
imagery in line 2s wound given by love which will bleed as long as he lives
endowing love with aggressive attributes. This figure, Love is immediately
personified as a sentient external force, employing a cupid motif that reoccurs
1
2
Ransom, J.C : Shakespeare at Sonnets', The World's Body (New York), 1938, p. 286
Hunter, GK: Essays in Criticism, Vol 3 Edition 2, Oxford University press, 1953, p 152-164
Jonathan Smith, Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 2, 2012, Accessed 22 March 2013, available from;
http://blogs.hanover.edu/astrophil/2012/08/09/astrophil-and-stella-sonnet-2/
The sestet in Sonnet 2 builds upon the reluctant yielding to love established in the
octave. His state is a paradoxical one, the speaker asserting that he calls it praise to
suffer tyranny, needing to find happiness in his misery. It is himself, rather than
Stella, that he needs to convince that all is well. Absent is the sudden ecstasy found
in Marlowes Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight. Sidney subverts the
Petrarchan undercurrent that, despite the current agony love has created, that the
turbulent emotional state will be rectified. There is instead a sullen, slave-like
resignation to love. In line 8s volta, Sidney characterizes love as like a jailer,
imprisoning him and leaving him to come to terms with his plight. His mental state
deteriorates, and by line 12 his conviction is all but gone, the poet suggesting a
descent into madness as he needs to employ the last remnant of [my] wit as with a
feeling skill he paints his hell. The conflicting double meaning of the metaphor
contained in the last line epitomizes the poets ambiguous attitude towards love.
Astrophil, as Hamilton notes, is divided against himself5, and eventually admits his
need to delude himselfcreate a false front to conceal the hellish situation he finds
himself in. His hell may be the Petrarchan meaning of hell, one that is ephemeral
and will emerge into fervent platonic desire for Stella. But the tone of the rest of the
4
Robert H. Ray: Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, The Explicator, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1994) p. 10
Hamilton, A.C: Sidney's Astrophel and Stella as a Sonnet Sequence, ELH, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Mar.,
1969), p. 69
5
While the sestet in sonnet 2 presents a love fraught with confusion, ambiguity and
even misery, at the volta in Sonnet 18 the poem shifts to a pensive, reflective
examination of the speakers love and the depths it reaches. In line 7 and 8, the
inevitability of decaying beauty is in sharp counterpoint to the opening couplet
affirming the ineffable beauty of the speaker. Even the holistic pure beauty of his
love, will sometime decline as all things in nature must. However, a marked shift
occurs at the volta in line 9, the conjunction but used to override the implications of
line 7 and 8. For the speakers love transcends temporal limits, sustaining the
summer metaphor and claiming her beauty as eternal. This is most demonstrable in
lines 10, 11 and 12 where repeated hyperboles concerning her immortal beauty
suggest that even death [shall] brag thou wanderst in his shade, providing her with
an ineffable mysticism made possible by the strength of his affection. In the last
couplet the speaker moves away from the abstract and provides the audience
quantification; his love and her beauty shall as long as men can breathe, measures
which add weight to the words themselves.
So, what aspect of love within the sestet deviates from the Petrarchan clich? The
answer lies in the poetic context of the piece. There is wide critical acknowledgement
that the first 126 of Shakespeares sonnets are addressed to a man, or fair youth.6 With
this in mind; the speakers eternal devotion to a beauty that shall not fade is infused
Fort, J. A: The Order and Chronology of Shakespeares Sonnets, Review of English Studies
(1933)
6
Universally pertinent themes of love and desire are not immutable. Their
manifestations, the way they are explored in the sonnets prove the diversity of the
experience itself. Thus, to approach Elizabethan Sonnets through the framework of
Petrarchan representations of love and desire is misguided. In Sonnet 2, Astrophil
struggles to reconcile the paradox between his misery and the knowledge that his love
should bestow joy. Concordantly, Shakespeares powerful declaration of devotion and
his meditations on the nature of beauty and the eternality of his love are inflected by
the contextual homoerotic undertones to the poem. Stylistically both sonnets
seemingly bear resemblance to their Petrarchan forebears. But it is the deviations
from the Petrarchan archetype that the conflicting motifs of love and desire embody.
Subversions that, ultimately, testify to a human experience that is unable to be
constrained by any one academic framework.
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