Astrophil and Stella: sonnet 10
Robert Stonehouse
Reason, in faith thou art well served, that still
Wouldst brabbling be with sense and love in me:
I rather wished thee climb the Muses’ hill
Or reach the fruit of Nature’s choicest tree
Or seek heaven’s course, or heaven’s inside to see;
Why shouldst thou toil our thorny soil to till?
Leave sense, and those which sense’s objects be:
Deal thou with powers of thought, leave love to will.
But thou wouldst needs fight both with love and sense,
With sword of wit, giving wounds of dispraise,
Till downright blows did foil thy cunning fence:
For soon as they strake thee with Stella’s rays,
Reason thou kneeldst, and offeredst straight to prove
By reason good, good reason her to love.
1. Reason, truly it serves you right, when you keep on
2. debating inside me with feeling and love.
3. What I wanted you to do was to scale Mount Helicon
4. or climb up to pick the apples of the Hesperides;
5. or go in for astronomy, or theology;
6. why labour at cultivating the hard ground of humanity?
7. Abandon feeling, and the things that are the objects of feeling;
8. get involved in what thinking can handle; love is a subject for the
Will.
9. But you insisted on quarrelling with love and feeling too,
10. using the weapon of ingenuity, wounding with criticism,
11. until your subtle fencing was frustrated, beaten down by main
force,
12. for as soon as love and feeling hit you with Stella’s beauty,
13. Reason, you knelt down and immediately promised a proof,
14. by the best logic, that it was reasonable to love her.
Line 5, ‘the Muses’ hill’. Hesiod met the Muses on Mount Helicon and
they gave him the power of song. (Theogony 1-35.)
Line 6, ‘the fruit’. I am not certain this means the golden apples of
the Hesperides, but they were renowned as sweet singers (‘ligyphonoi’,
Theogony 275, 518) and golden apples often appear in stories related
to love (Atalanta, the Judgment of Paris; the tree the Hesperides
guarded was a gift from Earth to Hera at her marriage to Zeus).
Line 5, ‘heaven’s inside’. I assume this is theology, which in the
Middle Ages was very logical and disputatious. Reason seems to be
thought of as a schoolman.
No help from Ringler’s commentary on any of these three points. This
poem seems to assume a pre-existing situation among its personified
abstractions; Reason has misbehaved and is reproved.
--
Robert Stonehouse
To mail me, replace invalid with uk. Inconvenience regretted.
LynnE
"Robert Stonehouse" <ew...@bcs.org.invalid> wrote in message
news:40f01a3...@news.cityscape.co.uk...
"Brabbling" is a fantastic word. We should start using it again. Is "strake"
an archaic past tense of "strike"?
L.
Robert Stonehouse
Yes! Sorry, I should have said that.
Or perhaps re-spelt it 'struck'. But the sound is so different.
'Brabbling'. Perhaps I took the life out of this by paraphrasing it as
'debating'. I wanted to convey the reference to a medieval
disputation, a formal debate carried on according to set rules however
heated it might get - as they did. I see Reason in this sonnet very
much on medieval lines. Disputations ('exercises') were the method of
examining degree candidates, but a similar format might also be used
to settle (or at least discuss) doctrinal questions.
Maybe 'dispute' would be a better word than 'debate' - it has more
fury, if less formality to our ears. 'Brabbling' does not sound like a
respectful description. It implies a degree of heat appropriate to the
theology of the 16th century rather than the 18th.
H.M. Colvin's introduction to the King Penguin version of "Ackerman's
Oxford" (originally published in 1814) says:
"Ackermann's plate shows the interior of the Divinity School fitted up
for the performace of these 'exercises'. It is divided by a wooden
railing into two parts, in the upper of which is an elevated pulpit
for the moderator and two others for the disputants. The lower part of
the School is left free for the audience ...
In the Middle Ages these disputations were (as they were intended to
be) a formidable intellectual ordeal in which there were many
failures. But by the end of the eighteenth century they had gradually
deteriorated into a lifeless formality in which prearranged questions
were followed by prearranged answers, 'handed down, from generation to
generation, on long slips of paper', and consisting (inthe words of
one who had taken part in them) 'of foolish syllogisms on foolish
subjects, of the formation or the significance of which the respondent
and opponent seldom knew more than an infant in swaddling clothes'."