Love, Sonnets and Songs.
Mary Wroth's prose romance, The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania, closely compares with her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, 1593 edition The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Wroth was undoubtedly following her uncle's lead by trying to emulate Astrophil and Stella. Astrophil and Stella and Pamphilia to Amphilantus are both about being in love and they both have over one hundred sonnets and songs.
After rereading both pieces, I was struck not by their similarities but by their differences. For example, Stella is assertive and Pamphilia is passive. Stella is truly bound by her love for Astrophil while Pamphilia cannot break herself free from the love she feels forAmphilantus. Sidney creates a female beauty that retains her voice and speaks, whereas Wroth allows her woman to remain inactive and vulnerable. However, Wroth no longer allows the female to be the object. She gives the female a voice and she is now the speaking subject. Pamphilia remains inactive and unfulfilled but very patient.
A good question for the reader to ask oneself is why would Wroth not establish a strong female speaking subject like the one she was trying to imitate? Wroth was the first woman writer in England to publish a romance and a sonnet sequence. She was by no means conservative or cared about what people thought of her, which has been proved by the antics of her personal life. So why not establish that same woman character/speaking voice in her prose? I would like now to look at the similarities and differences of Stella and Pamphilia.
First, Philip Sidney and his female character Stella. Stella has a voice and does speak, however, she speaks in the songs and not the sonnets themselves. We see in the first two lines in each stanza of the Eleventh Song, Stella speaking and Astrophil answering her.
Who is it that this dark night
Underneath my window plaineth?
It is one who from they sight
Being (ah) exiled, disdaineth
Every other vulgar light.
Because she is not granted a sonnet, the standpoint that women are not allowed a voice has some truth to it. Another standpoint is the way the women are viewed. Women are viewed by their physical aspects. For example, in sonnet 7, the speaker states:
When Nature make her chief work, Stella's eyes
In color black why wrapped she beams so bright?
And muted the women are, in A Room of One’s Own and “Aurora Leigh”. They cannot vocalize their opinions, wants, and needs when they are confined to their homes and discouraged from joining the predominantly male literary circles. Moreover, females are expected to act as foils to the males so that the patriarchal societies may flourish. Coleridge once said that a great mind is androgynous (Woolf, 106). When the men and women can cooperate and unite their minds and bodies, Shakespeare’s gifted sister will be able to re-emerge, freeing the muted voices of these oppressed women.
The Sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Love is Not All” demonstrates an unpleasant feeling about the knowledge of love with the impression to consider love as an unimportant element that does not worth dying for; the poem is a personal message addressing the intensity, importance, and transitory nature of love. The poet’s impression reflects her general point of view about love as portrays in the title “Love is Not All.” However, the unfolding part of the poem reveals the sarcastic truth that love is important.
According to Aristotle, there are two types of virtue. These are: intellectual and moral virtue. Intellectual virtue stems from growth and teaching. In order to be intellectually virtuous one must have a great amount of experience and have allocated a great amount of time in studying whatever task it is they are looking to be virtuous in. On the other hand, moral virtue is given birth through habit. It is not an object that we are just born with it. Moral virtue originates from constant repetition.
Both Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barret Browning and Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare delve into the passion of fervent love. In many ways these two sonnets can be compared and contrasted based upon poetic devices such as word choice, figurative language, and imagery.
...e speaker admits she is worried and confused when she says, “The sonnet is the story of a woman’s struggle to make choices regarding love.” (14) Her mind is disturbed from the trials of love.
In the search for the highest good, he assumes that is has three characteristics that stand out despite what the highest good is, these are always the same. It must be desirable for its own sake. Aristotle thinks the way for a human being to be happy in life is for them to successfully lead a life full of rational activity, this is because rationality is the defining human feature, but he also believes it should be in accordance with virtue in order to have a healthy soul. The Aristotelian system has the concept of ‘natural kinds’, Aristotle found this idea appealing. It consists of Species, Genus and Differentia, these ideas separate living things into their natural kinds, for people it would be said that animal is out genus. Human is out species and the differentia, which is what makes us different is our ability to reason and be rational. Because of what human beings are and our ability to be rational, we are unable to live like any other sort of animal because to be happy we must actualise and use our capacity to be rational through activity. Having split the soul up into three parts Aristotle was then able to determine what part happiness was associated with. He came the conclusion that because happiness has to do with the actions one makes it must come from the rational
Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It is clearly a pastoral comedy with a country setting, a theme revolving around love and a story which consists of a series of accidental meetings between characters and a resolution involving transformations of characters and divine intervention. The comedy involves the traditional literary device of moving urban characters into the country where they have to deal with life in a different manner. Whereas the pastoral comedy was usually a vehicle for satire on corrupted urban values, in this play the satire appears to be directed at the convention of Petrarchan love.(Rosenblum, 86)
Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting is very poetic and metaphorical in the play. Their encounter occurs at the Capulets’ party in the evening. Romeo sees Juliet and immediately falls head over heels for her. Once he comprehends his feeling of love for her, he speaks of his admiration for her, praising, “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight,/ For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night” (1.5.59–60). Romeo then walks over to Juliet at the end of the dance, and him and her begin to exchange words in beautiful sonnet form. While he professes his love for her, he compares himself to a pilgrim and depicts Juliet as a saint, explaining that if he kissed her it would rid him of his sin. Juliet counters and tells him, “For saints
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics investigates what is the human good, or “the highest good and end to which all human activity is directed towards” (Aristotle x). Through an argument against Plato’s theory of Forms, specifically that there is an ideal and eternal Form of Good, Aristotle says that the highest good is happiness, or eudaimonia (10). Happiness here refers to the fulfillment, or the flourishing, of one’s life (Aristotle x). It is not a mental or emotional state, the modern views of happiness. Aristotle reasons that in order to know how to achieve this human good, we must first know what is the human function (ergon), meaning “task” or “work,” because happiness means to perform the human function well, which he claims is “a life of
also seen in the latter lines of the sonnet; her lips are not as red
Like other sonnet sequences Astrophil and Stella concentrates primarily on attitudes and states of mind, whereby all the poems centre on a single all-absorbing experience, in this case Astrophil's obsessive and rejected love. The autobiographical element is evident and the sonnets voice Sidney's desires, regrets, and conflicts of conscience, which resulted from the social pressures and moral restraints of his time. Even though the reverberating theme of the poem is one of moral bleakness it was nevertheless greatly admired and appreciated by the righteous and virtuous Elizabethans because of the conventions it adhered to, such as the didactical element, and the complementing structural features.
The importance of Aristotle’s theory of virtue and happiness is that happiness serves as the ultimate end and purpose of human existence and we have to understand that happiness is not mere pleasure. Also, we have to be able to recognize that it is not virtue, but it is the exercise and practice of virtue. Happiness is a goal and is not just a temporary state and it cannot be achieved nor obtained until the end of one’s life. Happiness is part of human nature and it depends on reason because as humans we are rational beings. Aristotle makes it clear through his interpretation that happiness depends on developing morals and displaying virtues such as courage, generosity, selflessness, friendship, and justice. Ultimately, acquiring happiness is the realization of our power to act and perform rationally.
In Elizabethan Age, the sonnets had advanced into a form with new metric and rhyme scheme that was departing from Petrarchan sonnets. Yet, Elizabethan sonnets still carried the tradition of Petrarchan conceit. Petrarchan conceit was a figure used in love poems consisting detailed yet exaggerated comparisons to the lover's mistress that often emphasized the use of blazon. The application of blazon would emphasize more on the metaphorical perfection of the mistresses due to the natural objects were created by God, hence when the mistresses were better than nature, then there would be nothing better than the mistresses. Sonnet 130 written by William Shakespeare developed into an anti-Petrarchan position by denying the image of Petrarchan poet's mistresses who always were ideal and idolized.
Furthermore, examining Aristotle’s understanding of happiness and virtue, along with the distinctions he makes between intellectual and moral virtues will provide insight into why individuals may act a certain way. Aristotle defines “happiness” as flourishing or living well as a good in itself. He believes that when an individual makes a decision, it is for
Almost four hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare's work continues to live on through his readers. He provides them with vivid images of what love was like during the 1600's. Shakespeare put virtually indescribable feelings into beautiful words that fit the specific form of the sonnet. He wrote 154 sonnets; all of which discuss some stage or feature of love. Love was the common theme during the time Shakespeare was writing. However, Shakespeare wrote about it in such a way that captivated his reader and made them want to apply his words to their romances. What readers do not realize while they compare his sonnets to their real life relationships is that Shakespeare was continually defying the conventions of courtly love in his writings.