Philomela
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.

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Philomela
by Sir Philip Sidney

The nightingale, as soon as April bringeth
Unto her rested sense a perfect waking,
While late bare earth, proud of new clothing, springeth,
Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making,
And, mournfully bewailing,
Her throat in tunes expresseth
What grief her breast oppresseth,
For Tereus' force on her chaste will prevailing.

O Philomela fair, O take some gladness,
That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness:
Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth;
Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.

Alas, she hath no other cause of anguish
But Tereus' love, on her by strong hand wroken,
Wherein she suffering, all her spirits languish,
Full womanlike complains her will was broken.
But I, who, daily craving,
Cannot have to content me,
Have more cause to lament me,
Since wanting is more woe than too much having.

O Philomela fair, O take some gladness,
That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness:
Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth;
Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.

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Philomela by Sir Philip Sidney