Background to the poem

This sonnet is a song from Sidney’s long pastoral romance, Arcadia. Arguably written from the point of view of a woman, the poem deals with a perfectly requited love.

Each quatrain leads us deeper into the harmonious love the pair share. The first four lines are bound by rhyme. The following four lines parallel each other: ‘His heart in me’ is echoed by ‘My heart in him’. Then, with the next quatrain, we are spiralled into the state of ‘bliss’ that is mentioned in the final couplet. We can barely discern the speaker from his lover as ‘from me on him his hurt did light’. Who has inflicted the hurt? Whose hurt is it originally? Although the answers are not clear, the poem suggests a state of perfect two‑in‑oneness has been achieved. The shared hurt simply serves to deepen the connection. In the concluding couplet, we read ‘our bliss’, implying that there is no longer any separation between the two lovers. The repetition of the first line not only neatly seals the poem but suggests that this love is never-ending.

About Philip Sidney

A poet, soldier and courtier, Philip Sidney was one of the most celebrated figures of the Elizabethan age. He was a member of a distinguished and talented family; his sister, Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, was a patron of writers and supported her brother as he wrote his great work, Arcadia.

Sidney left Oxford before completing his degree and travelled extensively in France, Germany, Austria and Italy with his patron and father‑in‑law Sir Francis Walsingham. A militant Protestant who fell in and out of favour with Queen Elizabeth I, Sidney was appointed Governor of Flushing in the Netherlands and died after being wounded in the Battle of Zutphen, fighting the Spanish.

He wrote in his hugely influential ‘Defence of Poesy’ that ‘verse far exceedeth prose in the knitting up of memory’: an apt claim when his poetry, including Astrophil and Stella, with its 108 sonnets and 11 songs, and Arcadia are still read today.