Philip Sidney Sonnet 1 Analysis

Sidney’s Sonnet #1 Explication In Philip Sidney’s Sonnet #1 (“Loving in truth …”), he presents a speaker who is in love with a girl, but doesn’t know the best way to create verse to impress her and make her fall in love with him. The conflict in the sonnet is internal. The speaker ponders over what’s the best way to create a poem for his love so that she will fall in love with him. The pain he reveals is the pain he feels in trying to create a good poem for her that he hopes will cause her to love him. He hopes that his work will cause her to see him in a different way and cause her to love him back. The thematic ideas of the poem are love and self awareness. The speaker looks at other writers’ works to find inspiration to describe his love, but in the end, he decides that the best way to show his love for the girl is by using his heart and his true feelings. Sidney achieves these ideas through his use of form, rhetorical devices, imagery, sound devices, and tone. The form of this sonnet is a mixture with the first eight lines being an Italian sonnet and the last six lines being a Shakespearean sonnet. There are three stanzas in this sonnet: an octet, a …show more content…
When the speaker talks and says in line 5, “paint the blackest face of woe,” you can picture a sorrowful and upset face of the girl. In line 8, “Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain,” you can imagine the words like rain showering down and refreshing a red and fried brain. In lines 13, “Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:” you can see that he is biting his pen and then hitting himself with it. Another use of imagery is sound. In line 1, “Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,” you can hear him reading him reading his poem to his love. The last line of the poem when the speaker’s Muse is talking to him and telling him to “look in thy heart and write,” you can hear the strong words of his Muse telling the speaker obvious