Sidney's Sonnet Comparison

It is a well-known fact that Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus was largely influenced by her uncle Sir Philip Sidney’s own sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. The one main difference between Wroth’s sonnets and those of Sidney is that she delivers the poetry through a female protagonist, Pamphilia, whereas her uncle’s protagonist is a male, Astrophil. This is an interesting difference to consider when reading these poems because the struggles of the speakers of the poem are shaped by their differing genders. This is particularly true if we further consider the period in which these poems are set and what this means for the different social expectations and gender roles of that time. It is evident that even though …show more content…
But first, it is important to discuss how Worth’s form and structure of her Sonnet differs from Sidney’s. She uses the Shakespearean style, which can be broken down into three quatrains and a couple. The volta typically occurs at the end of the third quatrain in the Shakespearean style and we find that this is to be the case for Sonnet P39. Likewise to the Sidney sonnet, the meter of each line is in the iambic pentameter scheme. The rhyme scheme for this poem follows an ABBA ABBA CDDC EE pattern, which is very similar to Sidney’s pattern in Sonnet 72. We’ve already discussed how this poem conveys a message of selfhood as the speaker addresses herself through a personification of her eyes. The first two lines of the first quatrain are a warning to herself about how the eyes can betray her true feelings and the third and fourth line address the consequence of not being true to her feelings. She says, “Bee true unto your selves for nothings bought / More deere then doubt which brings a lovers fast”. “Fast” here means “abstaining from”, thus, the speaker is saying that being false to oneself or doubting one’s identity will result in the distancing of the lover of that person. It is interesting that the speaker is seeing love contingent on self-acceptance. Again, this sonnet greatly contrasts to Sidney’s sonnets because of how it values womanhood. Furthermore, in the second quatrain we begin to see the speaker’s dilemma with expressing her desire, “The pride of your desires; lett them bee taught / Theyr faults for shame, they could noe truer last”. She fears expressing her desire for fear of being shamed by society. Quatrain three begins on a different tone from the first two as the speaker throws caution to the wind and stands up for her freedom to feel desire. The final line of this stanza says, “Watch, gaze,