First Song
by Sir Philip Sidney
English poet, courtier, patron of poets and scholars. One of the great literary figures of Elizabethan England, his heroic prose romance, the Arcadia (1580, revised 1584) was the most important work of prose fiction in sixteenth-century England. He wrote the first great Elizabethan sonnet cycles, Astrophil and Stella (1582), a sequence of one hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs which explore the mind of the lover. His Defense of Poesie (1589) was the finest work of Elizabethan literary criticism. His successful experiments and technique influenced many other Renaissance poets like Spenser, Campion, Drayton and Jonson.
Astrophel and Stella
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Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes intendeth, Who hath the eyes which marry state with pleasure? Who hath the lips where wit in fairness reigneth? Who hath the feet whose step all sweetness planteth? Who hath the breast whose milk doth passions nourish? Who hath the hand which without stroke subdueth? Who hath the hair which, loosest, fastest tieth? Who hath the voice which soul from senses sunders? Only with you not miracles are wonders. Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes intendeth, |