Proud-pied April: Never a bargain better driven

You could spend the entire month on various Elizabethan poets. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Donne, Jonson…the age doesn’t get more golden as far as English lit goes.

So let’s have Sir Philip Sidney today. Like Marlowe and Raleigh, Sidney was one of those utility players: soldier, courtier, poet, politician. He was part of the Dudley family, which put him in close proximity to Elizabeth, and embarked on diplomatic missions before he was 20; at the age of 22 he was in Paris and witnessed the Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre, which must have shaped his already strong Protestant convictions.

By age 25 he wrote an open letter the Queen detailing why she should not marry the (French Catholic) Duc d’Alençon. Among his objections was the fact that d’Alençon was a son of Catherine de Medicis, “the Jezebel of our age”, who of course had been critical to the Saint Bartholomew Day events of five years earlier. Pretty bold for a young man, although of course it was a different age, and he’d already paid a lot of dues.

Sidney was as bold a military leader against Spain as he was a matrimonial advisor. He was wounded at the Battle of Zutphen. I have to think that the 26 days it took to die from gangrene must have been ghastly. He was not yet 32 years old.

As a man of letters, Sidney held that the purpose of poetry is “to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” He wrote in a variety of formats. Here’s an example.

“My true love hath my heart”

My true-love hath my heart and I have his,

By just exchange one for the other given:

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;

There never was a bargain better driven.

His heart in me keeps me and him in one;

My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:

He loves my heart, for once it was his own;

I cherish his because in me it bides.

His heart his wound received from my sight;

My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;

For as from me on him his hurt did light,

So still, methought, in me his hurt did smart:

Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,

My true love hath my heart and I have his.