Astrophil and Stella 63: O Grammar rules, O now your virtues show

1. Try “translating” Sidney’s poem into contemporary language. It might be helpful to do this in two steps: first, try to write out the poem as prose, in sentences. Then try to break your prose sentences into lines. Look closely at Sidney’s lines and try to mimic the way they work in your own “translation.” 

2. Sidney’s poem depends on different kinds of word play, including puns, to make its point. Go through the poem and circle all the words with multiple meanings. For example: rules, show, and awful (which also meant “awe-full” or full of awe in Sidney’s time) in the first two lines. Now use those same words to write your own poem addressing language. See John Ashbery’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” for a contemporary example of a poet addressing language. 

3. “Astrophil and Stella 63” is a sonnet and also part of a longer sequence that deals almost exclusively with Sidney’s unrequited love. Try writing the next sonnet in this sequence. Begin (as a kind of sonnet sequence known as the sonnet crown does) with the last line of sonnet 63, “That in one speech two Negatives affirm.”

1. This poem is part of a sonnet sequence, a popular form in Sidney’s day. Sonnets have a “turn”—a point in the poem where the argument shifts. Try to find Sidney’s “turn” in this sonnet. What happens to the poem’s language and tone after the turn? What conclusions does Sidney arrive at by the poem’s end? 

2. In her lively and comprehensive poem guide to this poem, Ange Mlinko notes that Sidney, like other poets who play with language in their work, suffered criticism for being just “clever”—even “trivial” in his treatment of love. Do you think Sidney displays real emotion in this poem? Why or why not? Where do you see emotion happening in the poem itself, and how? 

3. Why does Sidney personify Grammar in this poem? How is Grammar figured—what kind of “person” does it seem to be? How does Sidney use Grammar in connection with Stella?

1. Perhaps in preparation for the writing prompt on word play, have your students use the OED to discover the historical meaning and usage of certain words in Sonnet 63. You might assign a few words to each group and then have them present the history of each word to the class, noting both how Sidney used the word and how we do. Stress that this can go both ways: that is, we now have a very contemporary meaning of “rules” (Grammar rules!) that Sidney wouldn’t have known. How does our historical and cultural context influence the meaning we give to words, and the way we read poems? 

2. Edna St. Vincent Millay once wrote a sonnet whose first line is, “I will put chaos into fourteen lines.” In what ways is Sidney’s sonnet “chaotic”? Review different kinds of sonnets with your class, and perhaps provide examples. What kinds of arguments, complaints, ideas, and emotional states do sonnets represent? Try having the class write a collaborative sonnet. Beginning with Millay’s line, have each student add a line until there are 14 lines total. Ask students to think about the different kinds of sonnets with their varying voltas, rhyme schemes, etc. 

3. Gather individual sonnets from a variety of sonnet sequences—try to include both traditional and contemporary sequences, for example Shakespeare’s “Sonnets,” Rupert Brooke’s “1914” sequence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” Ted Berrigan’s “Sonnets,” Karen Volkman’s Spar, and The Lamp with Wings: 60 Love Sonnets (2011) by M.A. Vizsolyi. As a class or in small groups, compare and contrast the sonnets. How have sonnets changed over time—both in terms of form and content? Can you tell what each sonnet’s larger sequence might be about? Have each group write a cento, a kind of found poem composed entirely of lines from other poems. Their cento, made from lines of the sonnets they’ve looked at, should be a sonnet too.