from The Old Arcadia

Sir Philip Sidney

My sheep are thoughts, which I both guide and serve;

Their pasture is fair hills of fruitless love;

On barren sweets they feed, and feeding starve;

I wail their lot, but will not other prove.

My sheephook is wanhope, which all upholds;

My weeds, desire, cut out in endless folds.

What wool my sheep shall bear, while thus they live,

In you it is, you must the judgment give.

In the old days, when unscrupulous politicians, mercenary soldiers, and great poets were less easy to distinguish from one another, there lived a young man named Philip Sidney. He was, according the Cambridge Guide to English Literature, from a family "most exalted." Born in 1554, he became "one of the brighter ornaments of Elizabeth's court," not only as a diplomat but also as a poet and a composer of masques (short but formal dramatic entertainments--not quite plays, not quite poems--written for private performance). He was knighted in 1582, the same year he was married. In 1585, he was appointed governor of Flushing, in the Netherlands; and a year later "his thigh was smashed by musket shot" during an attack on the Spanish forces in Zutphen. He died of his injuries, at age 32.

None of Sidney's poetry was published during his lifetime; but as was common during the period, his manuscripts circulated widely among his acquaintance. His "appearance in English poetry is sudden, brilliant, and brief." As C. S. Lewis said, he "rises out of the contemporary Drab almost as a rocket rises."

The poem above is from The Old Arcadia, completed in 1580 when he was 26 years old, and written for his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke. An early attempt at prose fiction, it is a somewhat confusing pastoral romance interspersed with poems and songs; and Sidney referred to it as "This idle work of mine, this child which I am loth to father."