Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 200
Milli mála 13/2021 199
(“rimes, running in ratling rowes”), a figure dependent on the
human voice for its effect. Puttenham, for instance, writes that
alliteration “notably affect[s] the ear.”70 Although their “Dictionaries
methode” may suggest the silence of a study or library, the word’s
etymology (from the Latin dicere) links it to speech. At the same
time, Sidney accuses his antagonists of gathering (rhetorical) flow-
ers into (a) “Poesie.” The allusion is perhaps to A Hundreth Sundrie
Flowres by George Gascoigne (1573), reissued as Poesies (1575), with
sections entitled “Flowers,” “Hearbes,” and “Weedes.” But
“wring[ing]” poetic flowers into “Poesie[s]” also invokes the genre
of posy—short poems inscribed upon objects such as “fruit trench-
ers of wood” or “rings, jewels and the like.”71 In other words, Sidney
equally objects to inscriptions, and the portmanteau word “w/ring”
suggests both artisanal production and acoustic reverberation.
Sung, sighed, or inscribed, the verse of his predecessors leaves
Sidney unsatisfied.
His solution, however, articulates an idea of lyric that is star-
tlingly self-emasculating. According to Sidney, poets should for-
sake their search for “purling spring[s]” in the “ribs of old Parnassus”
and instead place their thirsty mouths at “fullest breasts of Fame”
by beholding Stella’s beauty. However, the transition from optic
pleasure to poetic utterance—which also involves a gendered shift
from father (Parnassus, Petrarch) to mother (Fame, Stella)—is less
unproblematic than Sidney’s celebratory tone suggests. “The prin-
ciple of intelligibility, in lyric poetry,” Paul de Man argues, “de-
pends on the phenomenalization of the poetic voice.”72 A lyric
poem is contingent on our ability to imagine a speaking I behind
the text. But Sidney’s sonnet demands that lyric poets reconcile two
physiologically antithetical impulses: speaking (“indite”) and feed-
ing (“nurse at fullest breasts”). Granted, in the temporality imag-
ined by the poem, feeding at Fame’s swollen breasts should follow
speech as a kind of gratification, but in the reading chronology, oral
consumption in fact precedes and legitimizes poetry. With his
mouth full of milk, Sidney’s lyric poet is unlikely to perform an
70 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 258.
71 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 146; Scott, Model of Poesy, 29.
72 de Man, “Lyrical Voice,” 55.
DANILA SOKOLOV