Daniel Philip Knauss
Master's Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MA
in
English
Approved
Robert V. Young, Chair
Harry C. West, Co-Chair
M. Thomas Hester, Co-Chair
September 11, 1998
Raleigh, North Carolina
Abstract
KNAUSS, DANIEL PHILIP. Love's Refinement: Metaphysical Expressions of Desire in Philip Sidney and John Donne.
(Under the direction of R. V. Young.)
Contrary to critics who assert that Elizabethan and Jacobean poets can be categorically differentiated from each other according to their philosophical outlook and style, Sir Philip Sidney' Astrophil and Stella and John Donne's Songs and Sonets indicate that strong continuity exists between them. Petrarchan figurative devices in their poetry reflect a common theory of metaphoric language that is based on analogy through universal correspondences. The elaborate rhetoric and extended metaphors that characterize Donne's metaphysical conceits are preceded and informed by Sidney's humanist poetics. Sidney's writings, primarily Astrophil and Stella, aim at harmonizing disparate extremes in a use of wit that can be characterized as metaphysical even in advance of Donne and seventeenth-century "metaphysical" poetry. A comparison of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Donne's Songs and Sonets shows them to be contiguous and continuous innovators in the Petrarchan love lyric.
Both Astrophil and Stella and Donne's Songs and Sonets are concerned with the problem of desire which engages the Petrarchan poet-lover in a self-questioning state between his knowledge of Neoplatonic love theory and his own particular experiences in love as an actual, sensual state of being. Astrophil, the speaker and fictive author of Astrophil and Stella, shows the failure of the poet-lover who attempts to work his own way to the top of the Neoplatonic ladder of love by inverting it and pulling it down to ground level by the sheer force of his wholly imaginative, fantastic, and increasingly delusional will which dominates and debases his desires. That is, Astrophil upholds his image of Stella, his beloved, not as a figure of a transcendent ideal but as a reality in whom ideality inheres. Rather than attempting to forsake the image of the beloved for a purified, spiritual desire of the ideals and virtues that she represents, he internalizes his image of Stella to such an extent that she becomes an idol confused with his own self-love and his pretensions to poetic inspiration and invention. He embraces the image of Stella more with his will than with his wit in an effort to manipulate and control the actual separation between them. By taking this approach to love, Astrophil becomes increasingly egocentric and withdrawn into a state of self-imposed solipsism. Refusing to accept the ironies that amass between his false, self-constructed images and the reality of his existence, Astrophil and Stella terminates with Astrophil trapped within the conditions he has defined.
This novel conclusion, although firmly based in conventional Petrarchan precepts, exposes the issues that constantly loom before any Petrarchan love lyricist; that is, the problematic identities and relationships of images, ideas, and realities; invention, inspiration, and imitation. On the other hand, Songs and Sonets shows a multiplicity of divergent attitudes toward negotiating the Neoplatonic ladder of love rather than a single positive or negative progression. Some of Donne's speakers resemble those in Astrophil and Stella in their arguments and attitudes toward love and poetry, but several of the most poignant and exploratory poems admit the necessity of idealized image-making while also accepting the inevitable irony in such images. Thus Donne's sequence can be seen as an acknowledgment of Sidney's exposure of the inherent instability involved in poetic attempts to transpose the ideal into the real, but it can also be seen as an innovative response to this problem that entails embracing the instability and irony of Petrarchan lyricism and then using that instability and irony prominently in poems whose speakers are conscious of the limitations of their conceits. As the primary example of this attitude, Donne's speaker in "A nocturnal upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day" explores the inherent irony in idealized images of the union of human lovers while yet recognizing the vision and direction they afford as sacramental foretypes of eternity and divine love.