Sir Philip Sidney

Sidney's long essay Defence of Poesie encapsulates several ideas that are typical of Renaissance thinking. His primary intention seems to be of showing that the writing of poetry has some special...

In the vast majority of his sonnets, Sir Philip Sidney adheres to the so-called "Petrarchan" sonnet form, named after its Italian originator Petrarch. This type of sonnet originated the...

Sir Philip Sidney’s “Sonnet 31,” as a perfect example of apostrophe (the figure of speech in which the speaker talks to an absent person or an inanimate object), is a direct address to the moon....

Sonnet 31 addresses the moon in a type of personification called pathetic fallacy. Personification through pathetic fallacy is used only for nature (strict personification is used for nature,...

It is from Astrophel and Stella, a fictional account of a love story - which might have some relevance to Sidney himself, but that is debate-able. "Astrophel" means star (astro) and lover (phil)...

I think I'll have a go at it...it looks like an interesting poem. You're right, though, it isn't an easy one to find analysis of: stanza 1 My mouth doth water, and my breast doth swell, My tongue...

Sir Philip Sidney's sonnets are collected in his sonnet cycle Astrophil and Stella, names meaning Star-Lover and Star, respectively. Sonneteers wrote a lifetime of sonnets that were unified in...

In Sir Philip Sidney's "Sonnet XXXI", the writer is addressing the moon. In the first two lines, he is commenting on the pale, sad appearance of the moon, and then, in the remainder of...

In the following lines taken from Sir Philip Sidney's "Defense of Poesy" (1595), he is discussing the current state of affairs in poetry and the writing of poetry. In (a), "our tragedies and...

An apology in this context means a defense. And what Sir Philip's defending here is poetry. To be more specific he's defending it against those such as the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato who...

Sidney included this poem in his incredibly popular proto-novel, Arcadia. A shepherdess sings this to a beloved shepherd, and it is thus a beautiful pastoral interlude. The pastoral became a...

The rhythm, or meter, of this poem is iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in British poetry (especially pre-twentieth century), and it also the meter that most resembles...

Given the fact that in the sixteenth century, when Sidney lived and composed his poetry, it was only really the upper classes, some of the aspiring middle classes, and a select few other...

Sonnet 21 from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella sonnet sequence is a highly typical poem that exemplifies many of the standard themes and techniques of the sequence as a whole. In this...

The sonnet begins with an invocation to sleep, which is personified and given an extravagant set of titles, beginning with those that emphasize the restorative qualities of sleep and continuing to...

“The Bargain” is part of Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral romance Arcadia, and it presents a love relationship through the imagery of an exchange of hearts. Let's look at this more closely. The speaker...

In this poem, a female speaker describes the intense bond she feels with and for a beloved male. The poem reiterates the basic idea that the lovers have exchanged hearts: she possesses his heart...

In general, Sidney's defense of poetry (or poesie) was in response to attacks on poetry (namely from Stephen Gosson at the time) who claimed that "fiction-making" was morally questionable. Sidney...

In a particularly important passage of his Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney sums up a number of his most significant assumptions about poetry as an art. He speaks of poets as writers who...

Sir Philip Sidney's poem "My True Love Hath My Heart" is written in iambic pentameter. (This is the rhythm.) This means that there are ten syllables per line, and that the stress rests on every...

Sidney's Sonnet 31 is replete with clever and often humorous plays on words as wordplay is an important quality in a Renaissance courtier and writer. J.C.A. Rathmell contends that Sidney's poetry...

This poem by Philip Sidney is a sonnet, so the structure of the poem is 14 lines, and in this case, it has an Italian Sonnet structure. You can see that the first 8 lines (the octet) are broken...

This is the internal conflict the speaker is experiencing. He believes he can connect with Stella if he can get her to read his writing, even if it means she does so out of pity for him. As the...

The desire for Truth in the 16th century (1500s) was expressed in Sir Philip Sidney's poetic treatise The Defence of Poetry. In it he explains the poetical concept of mimesis, or mimetics: the art...