Obtaining Grace: Poetic Language and the Language of Reform in Astrophil and Stella

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the treatment of grace in Sidney’s sonnet-sequence, Astrophil and Stella, to interrogate the place of secular lyric within Protestant poetics. Although Protestant poetics is now understood to cover a range of positions—from a purist model of language that emphasizes the unbridgeable gap between a divine Logos and fallen human words (a “cult of the signified”), to a more sacramental model that sees humanity’s world and words as suffused with the spirit (a “cult of the sign”)—both share an assumption that life is meaningful and that God makes it so. Sidney follows Petrarch in breaking with these models, using poetic language and poetic form (a “cult of the signifier”) to show how much more there is to language than signification alone. Ultimately, grace and God are to be found as much in rhythm, rhyme, wordplay, music, and sound, as in those elements of language that signify.