Astrophil and Stella 48

By Sir Philip Sidney 1554–1586 Philip Sidney

Soul’s joy, bend not those morning stars from me,

Where virtue is made strong by beauty’s might,

Where love is chasteness, pain doth learn delight,

And humbleness grows one with majesty.

Whatever may ensue, O let me be

Co-partner of the riches of that sight;

Let not mine eyes be hell-driv’n from that light;

O look, O shine, O let me die and see.

For though I oft my self of them bemoan,

That through my heart their beamy darts be gone,

Whose cureless wounds even now most freshly bleed,

Yet since my death wound is already got,

Dear killer, spare not they sweet cruel shot;

A kind of grace it is to slay with speed.

Biography

The grandson of the Duke of Northumberland and heir presumptive to the earls of Leicester and Warwick, Sir Philip Sidney was not himself a nobleman. Today he is closely associated in the popular imagination with the court of Elizabeth I, though he spent relatively little time at the English court, and until his appointment as governor of Flushing in 1585 received little preferment from Elizabeth. Viewed in his own age as the . . .

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