About Astrophil and Stella

Sidney, Philip, Sir. The works of the Honourable Sr. Philip Sidney, Kt., in prose and verse : in three volumes : containing, I. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.--II. The defense of poesy.---III. Astrophel and Stella.--IV. The remedy of love; sonnets, &c.--V. The Lady of May : a masque.--VI. The life of the author. 3 vols. 14th edition. London : Printed for E. Taylor, A. Bettesworth, E. Curll, W. Mears, and R. Gosling, 1725.
Starred Book Collection

Astrophel and Stella (now called Astrophil and Stella), which includes 108 sonnets and 11 songs, is the first in a long line of Elizabethan sonnet cycles. "Sonnet cycles" were so named because they incorporated linked sonnets that generally described the progressive rise and fall of a love relationship. In other words, through a number of distinct but related poems, it was possible to infer a plot. Most of the sonnets in Astrophel and Stella are influenced by Petrarchan conventions, incorporating traditional methods such as addressing the moon and the world of sleep and dreams, mourning the lady's absence, praising her unique beauty, bemoaning her coldness, and highlighting the lover's frustrated longings. Like Petrarch's poems, Sidney's work displays a variation of emotion from sonnet to sonnet within the trappings of a vague but thematic narrative. Sidney's experiments with rhyme scheme in his sonnets also were deeply significant for English Renaissance poetry, essentially freeing the English sonnet from the inflexible rhyming requirements of the Italian sonnet form.

Though the poems circulated widely in manuscript form, an official edition was not printed until 1591, five years after Sidney's death. This text, however, was considered to be inaccurate, and the most authoritative version came from a 1598 folio of Sidney's Arcadia, which contained an edition of Astrophel and Stella. This folio was supervised directly by Sidney's sister.

Sidney's sonnet sequence also exhibits clear references to Homeric epic, particularly Homer's Penelope. Some scholars have suggested that the 108 sonnets in the sequence represent the 108 suitors of Penelope, who play a game of striving to hit the Penelope stone in order to determine who can court her. The 119 poems are also just one number short of the number of months Ulysses spent trying to return home to Penelope in The Odyssey. The structure of the sonnet sequence, falling one month short of achieving Ulysses's journey home, can be seen as an emphasis on Sidney's failure in his pursuit of his own Penelope.

It is generally accepted that the Stella of the poems is Penelope Devereux, later Lady Rich, and that Astrophel (Astrophil) is Sidney himself. Critics disagree, however, on whether Sidney's love for Penelope is real or merely literary, meant simply to emulate the style of Petrarch's poetic adoration of "Laura." Because neither Elizabethan historians nor Sidney's own early biographers gave any clear account of his relationship with the Stella of the poems, the sonnets themselves are the only key to contextualizing the poetry with his romantic life.

The impossibility of a successful relationship between the two is a key theme of the sequence. The rift between the two is also expressed in the title of the piece. First of all, the title is made up of one name of Greek origin and one name of Latin origin: a clear disjunction. The presence of the grammatical copula "and" suggests that the two are a couple (such as "Tristan and Isolde" or "Romeo and Juliet"), which readers immediately realize is not the case. Even the names themselves, meaning "star-lover" and "star," describes a separation between the two: there will always be distance between the stars and those who love them.

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A pleasing land of drowsy head it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer sky.
--Castle of Indolence

In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.

I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley...

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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
About Washington Irving

Blank Verse

Is a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter (like that which is used in Shakespearean plays) read more...

You stars that reign'd at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist
Into the entrails of yon labouring clouds,
That when they vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from their smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to Heaven.

Doctor Faustus

Petrarchan sonnet

The Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two main parts, called the octave and the sestet.

The octave is eight lines long, and typically follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, or ABBACDDC.

The sestet occupies the remaining six lines of the poem, and typically follows a rhyme scheme of CDCDCD, or CDECDE.

The octave and the sestet are usually contrasted in some key way: for example, the octave may ask a question to which the sestet offers an answer. In the following Petrarchan sonnet, John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," the octave describes past events--the speaker's previous, unsatisfying examinations of the "realms of gold," Homer's poems--while the sestet describes the present--the speaker's sense of discovery upon finding Chapman's translations: Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse have I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The Sonnet Form

A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem, traditionally written in iambic pentameter--that is, in lines ten syllables long, with accents falling on every second syllable, as in: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" The sonnet form first became popular during the Italian Renaissance, when the poet Petrarch published a sequence of love sonnets addressed to an idealized woman named Laura. Taking firm hold among Italian poets, the sonnet spread throughout Europe to England, where, after its initial Renaissance, "Petrarchan" incarnation faded, the form enjoyed a number of revivals and periods of renewed interest. In Elizabethan England--the era during which Shakespeare's sonnets were written--the sonnet was the form of choice for lyric poets, particularly lyric poets seeking to engage with traditional themes of love and romance. (In addition to Shakespeare's monumental sequence, the Astrophel and Stella sequence by Sir Philip Sydney stands as one of the most important sonnet sequences of this period.) Sonnets were also written during the height of classical English verse, by Dryden and Pope, among others, and written again during the heyday of English Romanticism, when Wordsworth, Shelley, and particularly John Keats created wonderful sonnets. Today, the sonnet remains the most influential and important verse form in the history of English poetry.

Two kinds of sonnets have been most common in English poetry, and they take their names from the greatest poets to utilize them: the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet.

In just a short lifetime, Ms. Billie Holiday overcame the challenges of a poverty-stricken childhood to become one of the nation's most famous female African American jazz musicians. During the 1930's and 40's, she famously asserted her talents to raise the social and political consciousness of black society, particularly with her melodic protests against domestic violence and lynching practices across the south...

Source: Maryland Women's Hall of Fame Online

http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/womenshall/html/whflist.html

Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels

I. Pioneers: A raw frontier-village on Lake Champlain, at the end of the eighteenth century. Must be a picture of Cooper's home, as he knew it when a boy. A very lovely book. Natty Bumppo an old man, an old hunter half civilized.

2. The Last of the Mohicans: A historical fight between the British and the French, with Indians on both sides, at a Fort by Lake Champlain. Romantic flight of the British general's two daughters, conducted by the scout, Natty, who is in the prime of life; romantic death of the last of the Delawares.

3. The Prairie: A wagon of some huge, sinister Kentuckians trekking west into the unbroken prairie. Prairie Indians, and Natty, an old, old man; he dies seated on a chair on the Rocky Mountains, looking east.

4. The Pathfinder: The Great Lakes. Natty, a man of about thirty-five, makes an abortive proposal to a bouncing damsel, daughter of the Sergeant at the Fort.

5. Deerslayer: Natty and Hurry Harry, both quite young, are hunting in the virgin wild. They meet two white women. Lake Champlain again.

These are the five Leatherstocking books: Natty Bumppo being Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, Deerslayer, according to his ages.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/LAWRENCE/dhlch05.htm