(HOST) In anticipation of Valentine’s Day this Sunday, executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council and commentator Peter Gilbert, is considering a love poem that’s more than four hundred years old. While it appears to be mostly about virtue – it also speaks of passion and desire.
(GILBERT) In 1591, when Shakespeare was just beginning his career, Sir Philip Sidney, an English courtier, soldier, and distinguished poet, published a sonnet series entitled "Astrophil and Stella." It’s a series of 108 sonnets and eleven other poems about love between a man named Astrophil, or "Starlover," and Stella, or "Star." One of my favorites is Sonnet 71. Its style and inverted word order make it sound archaic to our modern ear – formal, and full of courtesy – all, that is, except the last line.
Astrophil is speaking to Stella, and he says, essentially, that anyone who would like to see how virtue can be embodied in natural beauty should look at you, Stella. Because in you, true goodness shows through and all vices are defeated. Vices are defeated in you, he says, not by brute force, but because reason reigns within you. Its light shines from your eyes so brightly that the night-birds of vice, like the lustful owl, take flight. But you, Stella, are not satisfied to simply be perfection; because while your beauty causes people to love you, your virtue, he says, bends their love and makes it virtuous.
All formal elegance and virtue, right? But the fun is in how the poem ends! Here’s the poem, and listen for that very last line:
Who will in fairest book of Nature know
How Virtue may best lodged in beauty be,
Let him but learn of Love to read in thee,
Stella, those fair lines, which true goodness show.
There shall he find all vices’ overthrow,
Not by rude force, but sweetest sovereignty
Of reason, from whose light those night-birds fly;
That inward sun in thine eyes shineth so.
And not content to be Perfection’s heir
Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move,
Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair.
So while thy beauty draws the heart to love,
As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good;
"But, ah," Desire still cries, "give me some food."
I love the poem because it’s so human, and, in the end, so funny. After all that dainty Elizabethan talk of Stella’s virtue and pure love and light of reason comes the voice of Desire – lust, we might say. And Desire speaks not in lofty eloquence, but rather in low, monosyllabic words, like the hungry brute it is: "’But, ah,’ Desire still cries, ‘give me some food.’"
Years ago, when I used to teach this poem to high school juniors – and remember, high school means hormones! – they understood that last line – perhaps only too well.