Sonnet LVI by Fulke Greville
"Sonnet LVI" by Fulke Greville is a multifaceted poem that explores themes of romantic and erotic love while simultaneously serving as a satire of traditional courtly love conventions. The poem features a first-person narrator who embarks on a grandiose quest reminiscent of chivalric tales, viewing himself as a noble knight pursuing the beauty of a married woman named Cynthia. However, this quest is undercut by the reality of his desires, revealing the narrator's delusions and egotism as he mistakenly elevates his infatuation to the level of spiritual love.
The narrative unfolds with irony, highlighting the stark contrast between the narrator's lofty self-image and the mundane reality of his situation. Greville employs rich metaphors, drawing comparisons that illustrate the narrator's despair when Cynthia ultimately rejects him, leaving him alone and reflective on his misguided pursuits. The poem's complexity is further enriched by its existence in multiple manuscript versions, which can provide deeper insights into Greville's intentions. Overall, "Sonnet LVI" invites readers to consider the intersection of desire, illusion, and reality within the context of love and self-importance.
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Sonnet LVI by Fulke Greville
First published: 1633, in Caelica
Type of poem: Satire
The Poem
“Sonnet LVI,” reflecting Fulke Greville’s peculiarly complex mind, is many things at once. As the title suggests, it is a lyrical “sonnet” (although that term had a much less rigid definition in Greville’s day than it does now) on the subject of romantic, erotic love; in this way, it recalls some of the love poems in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (literally, “Star Lover and Star”), written by Sir Philip Sidney, Greville’s contemporary and great friend. “Sonnet LVI” is also a satire, however, poking fun at certain key assumptions underlying courtly love poems, including many of Sidney’s. Finally, Greville’s poem is a kind of waking dream vision, one in which the philosophical, first-person narrator achieves an overblown, grandiose notion of his lover’s beauty and of his own importance, only to have his illusions come crashing down around him, frustrating his romantic desires.
Indeed, the narrator is deluded from the very beginning. As the poem opens, he sees himself as a glittering knight, right out of the pages of King Arthur, setting forth on a noble, chivalric quest. This quest, however, turns out to involve sin, vanity, and hypocrisy more than nobility, in that the narrator seeks not for the Holy Grail but for “Cynthia,” a married woman with whom the narrator is infatuated and longs to have an adulterous affair. Just at the point of achieving his questionable boon, the narrator is overcome by the lady’s beauty and falls into a swooning, ultimately egotistical vision of mythic gods and goddesses, seeing himself as at one in their company, while totally ignoring the real, flesh-and-blood woman beneath him, “Naked on a bed of play.” At this point, Cynthia has the good sense to leave him, no doubt in favor of a more sensible, earth-bound lover. Finding himself abruptly alone, the narrator bitterly rues his folly in confusing spiritual love with sexual delight.
As a poet, Greville was notorious for constantly tinkering with his verse, revising his body of work throughout his long, industrious life; accordingly, it is difficult to date any of his poems with precision. Further, the text of “Sonnet LVI” exists in at least two different manuscript versions, one of which, the so-called “Warwick MS,” inserts a passage of some twenty-four additional lines (after line 24) into the only version of the poem commonly available today. However, scholar Richard Waswo argues persuasively that these twenty-four “missing” lines are helpful to a proper understanding of Greville’s meaning. Therefore, students of “Sonnet LVI” might want to track down a printing of the poem in its longer form—perhaps in Waswo’s influential study The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry of Fulke Greville (1972).
Forms and Devices
Central to Greville’s intentions in the poem is his use of situational irony: The poem is informed from first to last by a sense of the yawning gap between illusion and reality, between expectation and fulfillment. Greville’s narrator is a megalomaniac, seeing all the universe as witnessing and applauding his erotic pursuits. Ravished by Cynthia’s loveliness, he rashly calls himself “a God,” variously identifying himself with Mars (the classical god of war), with Apollo (the patron god of poetry), and with Phaeton (a sun god who once nearly set all the world aflame).
He is none of these exalted figures; he is merely a quite ordinary man intent on conquering an ordinary, if attractive, woman. The narrator, like many people, insists upon elevating both his erotic impulses and his love object into the realm of the spiritual, the heavenly, the mythic. In doing so, he unconsciously reveals that his pursuit of the lady is actually no more than an exercise in exaggerated self-love, and she rightly abandons him. Here, then, lies the central irony of the poem’s action: In mistaking earthly delights for spiritual ones and in looking up at the inaccessible heavens instead of down at the available woman, the narrator loses out on the lovemaking he has sought so arduously.
Also notable in the poem is Greville’s facility with metaphor, a talent which has led critics to compare him favorably with the better-known John Donne (1572-1631). When the lady flees from him, for instance, the narrator successively compares himself to a riverbed deserted by its river, to the “Articke pole” abandoned by the sun, and finally to a condemned criminal confessing his sins at the site of his execution. These startling, unexpected metaphors have real power and contribute much to the disillusioned tone of the poem’s conclusion.