Retrospection as Saviour

The habit of blogging has been the hardest for me to start. Even though I am up to date with my readings. So here I am trying to develop a balanced approach to blogmania. In my last blog I noticed that it seemed a bit long and that it wasn’t too easy to follow for most people. I myself, after looking at it, felt that it was a bit confusing but I’m appreciative of the lone comment that I did get on it.

I realized that in the passion of composing or reading a work people often get carried away and have a hard time reeling in their thoughts into something that centers on a truly coherent theme. Often what composed in passion may at the time seem to be of something noteworthy, it is often only after a stroke of some retrospective editing does it actually become readable. This all leads me to wonder why is it always only in retrospect do we ever see things more clearly?

This question has its beginnings in my reading of the fourth, eighth and eleventh songs in A.S. These are the only sequences in which Stella is actually given a voice and it seems that throughout the three songs her message is consistent. She is politely telling Astrophil to please go away and stop pursuing her. Yet for love sick Astrophil this message doesn’t seem to sink in. How long after Stella’s final rejection of Astrophil did he pine after her? There is a whole sequence on the theme of absence, rejection and sorrow that carries through from the eleventh song straight to the end of the sequence for a total of thirteen more compositions. Sidney manages to create such a sorry picture of black sadness that you almost forget that Astrophil’s sorrow is clearly disproportionate to the reality of the situation. It seems of little surprise then, that A.S. wasn’t published until after his death because I don’t think Sidney would have ever allowed for a work that so closely resembles his real life, to be released during his lifetime.

Astrophil continually does those things that make any self-respecting/retrospective man’s heart sink. The kiss that he steals from Stella while she is asleep comes to mind as an act that makes him seem irrational and overtly foolish. At each syllable as Astrophil commits the act you want to scream out no, because the truth is that he has no place or right to kiss her. Also the fact that for all intensive purposes, Stella is out of his league and promised to someone else would make a normal man take the path of least resistance and rightfully pursue another. But Sidney instead has Astrophil continue on his course towards inevitable self-malice. This action is something that, I think, exposes the line of separation between Astrophil the character and Sidney the man and also demonstrates the skill with which Sidney paints the picture of the tortured soul. If A.S. does bear some semblance of Sidney’s real life it also serves to satisfy our notion of it as an illusion. This is accomplished through Astophil’s lack of retrospective, which thankfully helps to save the average man from being the fool.


Fitzroy Ford “Bloggers Unite”