By Dr Oliver Tearle

Astrophil and Stella is i of Elizabethan poetry'southward finest and brightest gems. In 108 sonnets and a handful of songs, Sir Philip Sidney produced the first sustained sonnet sequence in English (though non, contrary to popular conventionalities, the very first). Sonnet 39, beginning 'Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace', is one of the well-nigh widely anthologised poems in the sequence – and this analysis is going to effort to explicate why it remains so popular.

Come Slumber, O Sleep, the sure knot of peace,
The baiting identify of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner'due south release,
The indifferent judge between the high and depression;
With shield of proof shield me from out the press
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw;
O brand in me those civil wars to cease;
I will skilful tribute pay, if thou do then.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A sleeping accommodation deaf to noise, and blind to light;
A rosy garland, and a weary head;
And if these things, as existence thine past correct,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's prototype see.

In summary, Sidney begins Sonnet 39 with a request for sleep: this is the 2d of three sonnets about sleep and going to bed. Annotation how Sidney addresses sleep, personifying it. Sleep won't come, so he flatters information technology, lavishing kind epithets upon it: it is the 'knot' (or flowerbed or small garden plot; this sense is etymologically related to the more common meaning of 'knot') of peace, pregnant that it's a bed (a flowerbed, that is) where peace can flourish. It is the 'baiting place' of wit: a baiting-place was a wayside inn or end where i could take refreshment on a long journey.

In other words, getting a good night'southward sleep increases your wit – used here to refer by and large to wisdom, cleverness, and sharpness of mind. Woes are soothed by the soft lotion of sleep, similar healing a wound with an ointment. A poor Sir Philip Sidneyman tin proceeds 'wealth' and a prisoner 'release' in slumber, not least considering sleep is a time when our minds can dream a better life for us. Slumber is too a great leveller: the highest-built-in and the lowliest person are equal in sleep (though presumably, the high-born ones' beds are comfier).

Sidney calls upon slumber to protect him with its 'shield of proof' from the precipitous darts of despair he feels ('darts' suggesting Cupid's arrow: the despair Sidney'southward speaker feels is down to his hopeless honey for the woman, 'Stella'); he's prepared to pay protection money, or 'tribute', if slumber can provide a shield from such despairing thoughts.

Sidney says he can offering smoothen pillows, a comfortable bed, a bedroom that is substantially soundproof and blocks out all lite – and if all of this isn't plenty to induce slumber (because, afterward all, they already belong to slumber 'by correct'), and so he knows that something that will seal the deal: if sleep grants his wish and lets him get some shuteye, then in Sidney's dreams, slumber will be granted the ultimate advantage, of seeing the cute prototype of Stella there, more than lifelike than anywhere else. What an incentive!

This thought of trying to strike a bargain with slumber will strike a chord with anyone who has endured a sleepless dark considering of an affair of the middle. (Shakespeare would too write a sonnet on this subject field.) It doesn't matter if y'all have the perfect conditions for sleep: sometimes sleep just won't come, when you lot are what the poets used to call 'heartsick' over something or someone.

Sonnet 39 also contains some subtle effects involving rhyme: note how the first eight lines of the verse form, the octave, are rhymed abababab. It'southward usual exercise for a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet to have just 2 different rhymes in the octave, but they're unremarkably rhymed abbaabba. Rearranging them in alternating lines creates a seesaw back-and-forth issue that suggests the tossing and turning of the verse form'south speaker: 'Come slumber, O sleep, the certain knot of peace' sounds like a cry of despair, the speaker having exhausted all other options.

And the final line complicates the message of the sonnet. If Sidney – or his fictionalised speaker, Astrophil – cannot sleep for love of Stella, something it seems fair to infer from the other sonnets in Astrophil and Stella, then sleep volition hardly provide complete respite from her, since even in his dreams he expects to see her. In the last analysis, it is the surprise of this final line which crowns the verse form as one of the keen sonnets in the sequence.

The writer of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English language at Loughborough Academy. He is the writer of, amid others,The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History  andThe Great War, The Waste Country and the Modernist Long Verse form.

Paradigm: Sir Philip Sidney, from 1912 volume past Henry Thew Stephenson; Wikimedia Commons.