Here is a poem by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), a leading poet of the English Renaissance, a long-gone time when composing a sonnet was a gauge of the authentic, accomplished individual, a real person. He combines elegance, wit and feeling. 'Wit' in these instances is not being clever, but a faculty of the mind which finds its true place, in service of the heart. This comes from a long sequence of 108 sonnets and 11 songs, called Astrophil and Stella - Astrophil the star lover, Stella his star:
Because I oft, in dark abstracted guise,
Seem most alone in greatest company,
With dearth of words, or answers quite awry,
To them that would make speech of speech arise,
They deem, and of that doom the rumour flies,
That poison foul of bubbling pride doth lie
So in my swelling breast, that only I
Fawn on myself, and others do dispise.
Yet pride, I think, doth not my soul possess,
Which looks too oft in his unflatt'ring glass;
But one worse fault, ambition, I confess,
That makes me oft my best friends overpass;
Unseen, unheard, while thought to highest place
Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace.
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
ReplyDeleteThat she, dear 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,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."
(Sonnet 1)
Yet pride, I think, doth not my soul possess,
ReplyDeleteWhich looks too oft in his unflatt'ring glass;
But one worse fault, ambition, I confess,
That makes me oft my best friends overpass;
Unseen, unheard, while thought to highest place
Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace.
I grant that the connection is far from obvious, but in my mind these lines conjure up this extraordinary passage from Moby Dick; or, The Whale, by Herman Melville (1851):
“In a straitjacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales, And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread., floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.”