Summary and Critical Appreciation of Astrophel and Stella

         Astrophel and Stella is a series of sonnets written by Sir Phillip Sidney. It was published around the 1580s. The sonnets are a series of love poems between the man Astrophel and his star, Stella. Astrophel has fallen in love with Stella. Many of the sonnets are speeches delivered to Stella. We learn a lot about the internal world of Astrophel but little about Stella, aside from a few clues in her actions and reactions to the speeches.

For the first thirty sonnets or so, Stella does not return Astrophel’s love, but does not snub his affections either. She tries to be kind, or at least he believes that she is. Eventually, she marries another man. This does not deter Astrophel, but rather makes Stella more attractive because her marriage is an unhappy one, and he admires her sacrifice.

She does eventually return his affection, but she is never overcome by it. Astrophel, on the other hand, is increasingly more in love and tries to convince her to make love to him despite her vows. He even steals a kiss from her while she is sleeping. She realises that even though she loves him, she cannot continue the affair. Because Astrophel will need to consummate his passion, she ends the affair before any improper behaviour can happen.

We know that approximately the first thirty sonnets were written while Sidney’s real love, Penelope, was still unmarried and he was still at court. She never gave Sidney any overt encouragement, but just like Stella, never snubbed his affections. These thirty sonnets most likely comprise a year altogether as Sidney left the court, visited his sister’s estate, saw “Stella” at the mutual family’s house, and then returned to court.

Sidney discovers her marriage to Lord Rich somewhere between sonnets thirty-one and thirty-three. They were engaged to be married in their childhood, but this was broken off. Penelope’s marriage does not make her happy, a thing Sidney notes, but this does not diminish his passion for her. Rather, her selfless dedication to a marriage that brings her no satisfaction is something that Sidney admires and finds attractive.

He is often jealous of Lord Rich’s access to her, though he knows that she is not happy. He does not feel that her husband can appreciate her, and so he vows to win her heart. Around the sixtieth sonnet, she begins to return his love, but only platonically. She is unwilling to risk her reputation and her husband, and so tells Astrophel that the only way she will return his love is if they never consummate it.

He is content with this for a while, but as his passion grows deeper, we see his behaviour change. He cannot help but want to be with her physically, and this desire overrides his rational behaviour. He steals a kiss while she is sleeping, and this begins the downfall of their affair. She is incredibly angry that he broke her trust; the sonnet describes it as a sort of rape.

She pulls away, and her absence torments him. It takes a toll on him, and he loves her more deeply than ever. Around sonnet ninety-three, he admits to having wronged her, and his guilt and sorrow are overwhelming in the next few sonnets.

We do not have much detail, other than the kiss, for why he feels this way, but he makes it clear that the relationship is doomed forever. She falls ill, and he serenades her under her window to make her feel better. It has the opposite effect. She is so angry that he would continue to pursue her even after she has asked him not to, that she ends the relationship entirely. At the end of the series, he is alone and isolated. He retains some measure of happiness, despite how things turned out, knowing that his love for Stella is genuine and that she once loved him in return.

Sidney mimics a rhyme scheme from a famous poem by Petrarch to tell the story of his love. Just as Stella torments Astrophel, so was Petrarch tormented by his own love, a love that also causes him much joy. He touches on themes of love versus reason, as well as the conflicting desires of purity and desire.

It is clear that although Astrophel’s love for Stella was fruitless and ended, it brought him an enormous amount of joy as well. He remains happy that Stella once loved him. His inability to keep his love chaste ends their relationship, a point he makes in the sonnet after he steals a kiss. Love, for Astrophel, is something that cannot be contained, though he tries for a long time to keep Stella in his life.

Sidney introduced a new style of poetry into England during the Renaissance, changing the way literature was produced. In the end, he understands that although reason is well and good, he is happier having loved Stella with abandon and knowing that she once loved him as well.

Emily Dickinson as a poetess

         Almost unknown as a poet in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now recognised as one of America's greatest poets and, in the view of some, as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. The past fifty years or so have seen an outpouring of books and essays attempting to explain her poetry and her life. Some critics have used her life to try to explain her poetry, and others have tried to explain her life by referring to her poems, which they assume are autobiographical. The large number of poems she wrote (over 1700) makes it easy for critics to find support for their theories. And the fact that her life, her poems, and her letters are often difficult, if not impossible to understand, invites speculation.

Emily Dickinson's poetry speaks powerfully to us. It captures her insights and recreates meaningful events in living; it helps us to understand and even to re-live our own experiences through her intensity and with her emotional and intellectual clarity. Like John Keats, Emily Dickinson is a passionate poet. Though she lived in seclusion, she lived a passionate life. Within the confines of the family home, the garden, and her circle of family and friends, she felt with her whole heart, thought with intensity, and imagined with ardour, and she shared herself in her poetry and in her letters. She wrote of her life, "I find ecstasy in living, the mere sense of living is joy enough"

Writing poetry may have served Dickinson as a way of releasing or escaping from pain--from the deaths of loved ones, from her inability to resolve her doubts about God, from the terrors, however faint, which she saw within herself, in others, and in the world outside yet nearby. To say that she may have sublimated her pain into poetry does not invalidate her view of the power of poetry; both may be true and exist at the same time. 

In her poems, Dickinson adopts a variety of personas, including a little girl, a queen, a bride, a bridegroom, a wife, a dying woman, a nun, a boy, and a bee. Though nearly 150 of her poems begin with "I," the speaker is probably fictional, and the poem should not automatically be read as autobiography. Dickinson insisted on the distinction between her poetry and her life: "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse, it does not mean me--but a supposed person."

His poems are not easy: there is no logical thought that binds them, some construct or system; crowded with images that are often private conventions of the artist — such as the Circumference -, or seem to be thrown into the void, about elements of his everyday life, almost impossible to clarify. In her, everything is a metaphor, never usual; it is not possible to resort to a tradition to interpret and understand them. Emily was referring only to herself, and her attention is directed more and more towards herself as the years go by.

To penetrate the meaning of her poetry, it is necessary to purify oneself from the layers of linguistic, social, personal and cultural prejudices and customs, to renounce the usual ways of thinking, to open up to the possible and immerse oneself with the being in what she says. Suddenly, an image takes shape and illustrates the meaning. It is often destabilising, it is necessary to go back to the origins of thought, proceed by associations, and rely on intuition to understand it; at the same time, one is overwhelmed by strong feelings, by recognitions and similarities that seem to echo in the infinity of the collective and archetypal subconscious.

Emily indirectly expresses the mystery that she sees and hears, but that human language is unable to express. She has no other way; she faces it by getting as close as possible to the truth, and, like Icarus, she burns the wings of inspiration, yielding to the mystical vision. Proceeding over the years, her compositions become more and more elliptical, sparse, and little remains to be said about the ineffable. Punctuation is also at the service of this language of the unspeakable, like the hyphen that replaces a meaning that cannot be said, or pauses, asks for silence, to put words and images in order, place them and better understand their meaning.

Themes in the poems of Emily Dickinson

 

In the modern poetic world of America Emily Dickinson plays a significant role which makes her different from contemporary modern poets. Her poems question the nature of death and immortality. She is remembered for her unique poetry. She writes from life experience and her deepest thoughts and for herself as a way of letting out her feelings. She as a poet deals with various themes such as nature, love, pain and sufferings, death and immortality, God and religion, artistic philosophy, universality and so on. Thus the range of themes in her poetry is very wide. Actually she goes through the depth of humane psyche to the profundity of nature.

Emily feels the necessity and profundity of nature. It plays an important role to make her poetic theme glorious and age-worthy. To her nature is extremely harmonious. It is an image of human. She considers nature as the gentlest mother as she finds mother like love amidst nature. Nature is the source of joy and beauty, the beauty of that nature holds up is in the beholders' perspective.

Emily Dickinson’s treatment of love shows her as a representative figure in the field of love and emotion. Her love poems are psychological as well as autobiographical. Love is a mystic life force it should be free from voluptuousness. Her poems run the range from renunciation to professions of love to sexual passion; they are generally intense.

"If you were coming in the fall"

"I cannot live with you"

"I early took my dog"

"Wild nights! Wild nights!"

Death is one of the foremost themes in Dickinson’s poetry. No two poems have exactly the same understanding of death, however. Death is sometimes gentle, sometimes menacing, sometimes simply inevitable. In “Because I could not stop for Death –,“ she personifies death, and presents the process of dying as simply the realization that there is eternal life. Death is personified in many guises in her poems, ranging from a suitor to a tyrant. Her attitude is ambivalent; death is a terror to be feared and avoided, a trick played on humanity by God, a welcome relief, and a blessed way to heaven. Immortality is often related to death.

Immortality have covered an important place in her poetic world. Emily Dickinson says death functions as a connecting link between life and immortality. The conventional idea of immortality, with its insistence upon splendour and a majestic transformation, is in her poem uniquely reworked to present her belief in the reality of the soul after death.  

The theme of pain and sufferings is also an organic part of her poetic theme. Actually, Emily Dickinson is a poet of universal grief whose poetic feelings goes on with the stream of eternal sufferings. Pain plays a necessary role in human life. The amount of pain we experience generally exceeds the joy or other positive value contrasted with pain. Pain earns us purer moments of ecstasy and makes joy more vital. The pain of loss or of lacking/not having enhances our appreciation of victory, success, etc.; the pain of separation indicates the degree of our desire for union, whether with another human being or God.

 Man's relationship to God and nature is concerned throughout Dickinson's life. Her attitude toward God in her poems ranges from friendliness to anger and bitterness, and He is at times indifferent, at other times cruel. Emily Dickinson transcends her poetic range to make her immortal and universal. Her universe is the universe of all people. Her poetry shows her personal confession through better experience. We can call her greatest as a modern poet. Emily Dickinson is totally a perfect poet who expresses her deepest thoughts under the guise of various themes.