more cause to lament me, / Since wanting is more woe
than too much having” (ll. 17–20).
A subset of sonnets are included on the subject of
“his lady’s face in pain”: Sonnets 8 (“The scourge of
life, and death’s extreme disgrace”), 9 (“Woe, woe to
me, on me return the smart”), 10 (“Thou Pain, the only
guest of loathed constraint”), and 11 (“And have I
heard her say, ‘O cruel Pain!’”). Sonnet 9 is a BLAZON of
his beloved: “Her eyes, whom chance doth never move”
(l. 5), “Her breath, which makes a sour answer sweet”
(l. 6), “Her milken breasts” (l. 7), and “her aye well-
stepping feet” (l. 8).
The popular song, Sonnet 30, begins in glee that
Love is dead—“Ring out your bells, let mourning
shows be spread, / For love is dead” (ll. 1–2) and “From
them that use men thus: / Good lord, deliver us” (ll.
9–10)—only to end with anger: “Alas, I live: rage hath
this error bred; / Love is not dead, but sleepeth / In her
unmatched mind, / Where she his counsel keepeth /
Till due desert she fi nd” (ll. 31–36), moving from
pleased to saddened to angered to the fi nal plea of
“Good lord deliver us.”
The collection ends on a resigned note: rejecting
love and desiring to move the mind (ll. 1–4) to higher
things; rejecting love’s enslavement but seeing a kind
of death (ll. 13–14) in that and yet opening up to an
eternal love that will not rust or fade. The fi nal poem is
followed by the Latin inscription Splendidis longum
valedico nugis (I bid a long farewell to splendid trifl es
[his poems]). Fortunately, Sidney did not completely
abandon such trifl es.
See also ASTROPHIL AND STELLA (OVERVIEW); HERBERT,
MARY SIDNEY, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE; ITALIAN (PETRARCHAN)
SONNET; SONNET SEQUENCE.
FURTHER READING
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Sir Philip Sidney. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Fabry, Frank J. “Sidney’s Verse Adaptations to Two Six-
teenth-Century Italian Art Songs.” Renaissance Quarterly
23, no. 3 (1970): 237–255.
Marquis, Paul A. “Rereading Sidney’s Certain Sonnets.”
Renaissance Studies 8, no. 1 (1994): 65–75.
Ringler, William A., ed. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
Sidney, Philip (Sir). Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Edited by W.
A. Ringler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
———. Sir Philip Sidney. Edited by Katherine Duncan-
Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Warkentin, Germaine. “Sidney’s Certain Sonnets: Specula-
tions on the Evolution of the Text.” The Library 2, no. 1
(1980): 430–444.
Christine GilmoreCertain Sonnets 31: “Thou Blind Man’s Mark”
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (ca. 1581) This SONNET steps
away from ENGLISH SONNET form and instead follows
Continental sonnet traditions. Composed of an OCTAVE
and SESTET, Certain Sonnets 31 experiments with an
unusual rhyme scheme (ababbaba, bccbcc) that uses
only three end-rhymes and risks stiltedness. Some
might prefer the term QUATORZAIN for Sonnet 31 because
of the unorthodox rhyme scheme, which appears in no
other poems in SIR PHILIP SIDNEY’s Certain Sonnets. How-
ever, this sonnet employs other conventions of the
form. It has 14 rhymed lines, and the octave details a
problem, while the sestet resolves the problem.
The octave describes the poet in an emotional and
self-critical state, as if he were pointing at himself in
the mirror and seeing his own weakness and inclina-
tion toward fancifulness and pursuit of love, leaving
him “fond fancie’s scum” (l. 2). In the course of this
self-fl agellation, the poet characterizes himself as a
blind man’s abused target, a fool’s contrivance, and
“dregs of scattred thought” (ll. 1–2). He has squan-
dered his intelligence to pursue fancy: “Desire, desire I
have too dearely bought” (l. 5), he cries, and the result
is a “mangled mind” (l. 6) that should “to higher things
prepare” (l. 8). As the son of Sir Henry Sidney, an
administrator for Queen ELIZABETH I who served as
both lord president of the Marches of Wales and lord
deputy of Ireland, and, for a time, as heir to Robert
Dudley, earl of Leicester, Sidney had great expectations
for himself—and so did others, in England and on the
Continent.
The traditional VOLTA opens the sestet. The poet
moves from self-fl agellation to a refusal to see himself
as completely defeated, asserting that fancy has worked
in vain to ruin him, making him aspire to idle and
worthless things. Moving out of his despair, the poet
insists that efforts to destroy him are in vain. Fancy has
incited only smoke; he has not been burned or108 CERTAIN SONNETS 31: “THOU BLIND MAN’S MARK”