Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was so many things to his contemporaries. To history he is one of the first major poets of the Tudor ‘Renaissance’. Aristophil and Stella is one of the first sonnet sequences in English, and may well be the best of them.
Despite Sidney’s claims in his Defence that poetry was moral and lead to virtue, Aristophil and Stella is the story of an (?unrequited?) adulterous passion. After Sidney’s early death, Penelope Rich was happy to admit that she was ‘Stella’.
This is the first sonnet of the sequence, with its famous final line.