that see my wrack, and yet embrace the same?
when most I glory, then i feel most shame:
i willing run, yet while I run, repent.
my best wits still their own disgrace invent:
my very ink turns straight to stella’s name;
and yet my words, as them my pen doth frame,
avise themselves that they are vainly spent.
for though she pass all things, yet what is all
that unto me, who fare like him that both
looks to the skies and in a ditch doth fall?
oh let me prop my mind, yet in his growth,
and not in nature, for best fruits unfit:
“scholar,” saith love, “bend hitherward your wit.”
- philip sidney, sonnet 19, astrophel and stella. i think of wyatt’s character in his poems as a level-headed, essentially sober man with a great talent for love, and the voice of shakespeare’s sonnets as belonging to a ferociously clever, infinitely subtle imagination residing in an sensible exterior of broadcloth and low heels.
of course, the documented philip sidney was a charming, brilliant renaissance man, and he doesn’t write these poems to conceal his better qualities. but astrophil is kind of a windbag, if a talented one. the sidney we eventually come to know is the man who will eventually die to save a fellow soldier on a cold battlefield; perhaps astrophil’s high opinion of himself only seems funny when measured against the adult reality.
