From A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love

1.

In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?

Ways are on all sides, while the way I miss:

If to the right hand, there, in love I burn;

Let me go forward, therein danger is.



If to the left, suspicion hinders bliss;

Let me turn back, shame cries I ought return,

Nor faint, though crosses with my fortune kiss;

Stand still is harder, although sure to mourn.



Thus let me take the right, or left hand way,

Go forward, or stand still, or back retire:

I must these doubts endure without allay

Or help, but travail find for my best hire.



Yet that which most my troubled sense doth move,

Is to leave all, and take the thread of Love.

2.

Is to leave all, and take the thread of Love,

Which line straight leads unto the soul’s content,

Where choice delights with pleasure’s wings do move,

And idle fancy never room had lent.

When chaste thoughts guide us, then our minds are bent

To take that good which ills from us remove:

Light of true love brings fruit which none repent,

But constant lovers seek and wish to prove.

Love is the shining star of blessing’s light,

The fervent fire of zeal, the root of peace,

The lasting lamp, fed with the oil of right,

Image of faith, and womb for joy’s increase.



Love is true virtue, and his ends delight;

His flames are joys, his bands true lovers’ might.

3.

His flames are joys, his bands true lovers’ might,

No stain is there, but pure, as purest white,

Where no cloud can appear to dim his light,

Nor spot defile, but shame will soon requite.



Here are affections tried by Love’s just might

As gold by fire, and black discerned by white,

Error by truth, and darkness known by light,

Where faith is valued, for Love to requite.

Please him, and serve him, glory in his might

And firm he’ll be, as innocency white,

Clear as th’air, warm as sun’s beams, as day light,

Just as truth, constant as fate, joyed to requite.



Then Love obey, strive to observe his might

And be in his brave Court a glorious light.

Note: “crosses” (1, line seven) is a noun and refers “to confusing intersections in the maze, or troubles”. There’s a further pun in line 12 on “travail/travel”.

Virginia Woolf famously imagined a gifted sister for William Shakespeare, giving her a sombrely brief life – which inspired this exhibition in 2012.

As the daughter of Robert Sidney, and niece of Sir Philip and Mary, Countess of Pembroke, Mary Wroth, born in 1587, was far luckier than Shakespeare’s sister. She enjoyed long sabbaticals in the Sidney households, among books, sparkling literary and political companions and the classiest role models. But of course the best-educated women writers still faced social and artistic constraints.

The Petrarchan tradition, for instance, favoured “masculine” virtues: for the female protagonist, the only virtue in town was constancy. Wroth found a way round this restriction. Instead of opposing it, she rewrote constancy as an ideal virtue for the male lover, too.

The poems this week are textual great-grandchildren of her never-finished prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. The romance includes the sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanus, and this includes a 14-part Crown of Sonnets, the first three of which are shown above. I’ve followed the modernised text of Lady Mary Wroth: Poems, edited by RE Pritchard. There’s a link to the whole sonnet sequence here.

Wroth’s form neatly matches the thread-through-the-maze symbolism. The last line of each preceding sonnet becomes the first line of the next, and the first line of sonnet one becomes the final line of the last (14th) one. So after all her adventures, Pamphilia, a kind of female Theseus, is still lost in the labyrinth, still pursuing that unreliable thread of Love that “straight leads unto the soul’s content” – rather than a hungry Minotaur.

The diction is song-simple, the grammar compressed, the movement brisk. (There are poems designated “songs” at intervals elsewhere in the sequence, raising the possibility that sections of “Urania” were meant to be performed.) Wroth’s allusions, to Greek myth, alchemy and so on are straightforward and familiar. Glimpses of the everyday social world in metaphor-friendly, shop-soiled terms such as “hire” add something sparkier.

The second sonnet initially follows an erotic thread: then “choice delights” seem to mutate into “chaste thoughts” and the language turns a shade biblical. The third quatrain bonds secular and sacred in its imagery, as if Saint Paul had rewritten his sermon on charity to appeal to the contemporary courtier. It’s probable, of course, that “Love” encodes not only divinity (Cupid’s and God’s) but curtseys towards the King and/or Queen. Nor should we forget Mary Wroth’s lover, William Herbert, or the dedicatee of Urania, Countess Susan.

The last sonnet is a curious one: again, I suspect Wroth is humming a tune as she writes. Each quatrain ends with the same set of rhyme-words, and the whole sonnet has only one rhyme. Pritchard points out that Philip Sidney has a mono-rhymed sonnet in Book Three of Arcadia. True, but the word is different in each line. Wroth sets herself a differently tricky task, and the effect is like strong sunlight, hard and piercing. Scansion seems to go haywire in lines 10 and 11, particularly 11, but I’m convinced there’s no want of skill: Wroth is simply making the sonnet jive a little, as she visualises the “glorious light” of mutual fidelity in the Court of Love.