Sidney’s sequence of sonnets and songs follows Astrophel’s hopeless love for Stella, a married woman widely identified with Penelope Devereux. It opens with the famous sonnet of the poet seeking fit words and told by his Muse to look in his heart and write. This text follows the first printed edition of 1591, with its original spelling and the other sonnets of variable verse.
The first great English sonnet sequence, read here in the spelling of its first Elizabethan readers. Download the free EPUB.