A Sonnet a Day Take two: Lady Mary Wroth

Yesterday we looked at Anne Locke, in the context of thinking about why female poets aren’t recognised in the canon and why early sonnets by women are scarce. Today’s subject might be thought of as an exception that proves the rule: attracted to and fluent in the form precisely because she isn’t like the vast majority of her sex.

Educated, titled, rich, and with close examples of literary endeavour in her life, Lady Mary Wroth (1587-c.1652) was the niece of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), who wrote the first long sonnet sequence in English. Her father was also a poet, and her aunt was the Countess of Pembroke whose home was the centre of a circle of Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and intellectuals. You can read more about her at the Poetry Foundation.

This poem, Sonnet 37 from Wroth’s sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, is a great deal more formally controlled and technically competent than Locke’s (though the metre of the first line is a bit wobbly.) It’s a dramatic monologue, audibly influenced by the Jacobean stage: the speaker compares her own emotional darkness to the literal darkness of a personified ‘Night’, and asking it to accommodate her ‘Silence, and griefe.’ (I've kept the Elizabethan spelling, with its interchangeable 'u' and 'v'.)

Night, welcome art thou to my minde distrest,
Darke, heauy, sad, yet not more sad then I:
Neuer could’st thou find fitter company
For thine owne humour, then I thus opprest.
If thou beest darke, my wrongs still vnredrest
Saw neuer light, nor smallest blisse can spye:
If heauy ioy from me too fast doth hie,
And care out-goes my hope of quiet rest.
Then now in friendship ioyne with haplesse me,
Who am as sad and darke as thou canst be,
Hating all pleasure or delight of lyfe,
Silence, and griefe, with thee I best doe loue.
And from you three I know I can not moue,
Then let vs liue companions without strife.