Analyse Sir Philip Sidney’s Loving in Truth/ Is Sidney’s ‘Loving in Truth’ a poem about love or about the
conventions of writing poetry?
Like other creative persons of the
period, Sidney also came under the influence of sonnet-writing. Thus a series
of sonnets addressed to a single lady, expressing and reflecting on the
developing relationship between the poet and his love grew up. Though the story
does not have to be literal autobiography and questions of ‘sincerity’ are
hardly answered, Sidney’s love for Stella, on the artistic level, has been
traced to love-affair of the poet’s own life. Stella is said to be Penelope
Devereux, who did not or could not reciprocate the love and married Lord Rich.
It is, in fact, owing to the predisposition of the mind created by the Romantic
tradition of subjective art that we sometimes relate and interpret the works of
other writers of other periods before the Romantics to and in terms of their
biographical accounts.
It must be
remembered that with Loving in Truth the Astrophil and Stella
theme-sequence opens. Significantly the opening sonnet presents the dual theme
of how to write good poetry and how to win the favour of a beloved. The poet
even implies the question whether it is possible to a good poem aiming at
winning the beloved. At the very beginning of the sonnet Sidney makes it clear
that he writes the sonnet in order to win Stella. Here he employs the simplest
means—which any lover does, namely, the pain-pleasure-knowledge-pity-love
method:
“… she might take
some pleasure of my pain;
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain”.
