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  • Essay / Colonial Beauty in Sidney's “Astrophil and Stella” and Shakespeare's Sonnets

    The unique and extraordinary elements of dark beauty translate into an exotic otherness in the eyes of the poets. The most obvious and traditional methods confer divine attributes on women. Shakespeare first refutes this resemblance by emphasizing the earthly properties of his mistress in Sonnet 130: “I confess I never saw a goddess go, / My mistress, when she walks, walks on the ground” (11 -12). Next, Shakespeare swears “by heaven” that she does indeed possess goddess-like power through her love (13). Sidney fills his sonnets with divine references; Stella's eyes reveal her "miraculous power", and they are also "the windows now through which this heavenly guest/looks upon the world" ("A&S: 7", 9; "A&S: 9", 9-10 ). Although it is the women's dark properties that remind us of their otherworldliness, traditional blonde heroines inspire similar reactions in the poetry of their documentarians. Hall argues that there is a relationship between the otherness of black women and England's progress in colonization: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay “It is the attraction and fear of the possibility of “otherness” and linguistic polysemy that underlies most tropes of blackness in Renaissance poetry. , particularly in the dark/light dichotomy of the English sonnet cycle? The “black ladies” of the sonnets are at least in part the literary cousins ​​of the foreign women encountered in the travel tales, and they share the same subject position. encodes not only erotic desires, but also political, economic and literary ones. "'Astrophil and Stella' embodies colonial poetry under the guise of the dark/light dichotomy. The fact that Stella's white star inhabits an unknown inky sky pales in comparison to the exploratory conceits of Sonnet 1 . Hall argues that the sonnet cycle "is characterized by a studied rejection of the foreign. The sequence opens with Astrophil in search of invention and new language, "to paint the blackest face of misfortune" (1.5), but with the caveat that this new language must not be tainted with " strangeness". However, Astrophil maintains that his studies of English poetry are what bothered him "the feet of others still seemed to me only foreigners", with a play on metrical feet (11). elsewhere Astrophil who has a “sunburned brain”; his tropical mentality contrasts with the pale and blocked language of his compatriots. To escape these obstacles, Astrophil takes his “Trewand pen” to search for new countries and new words. and Stella's black eyes are a metaphor for this New World: "Patterns like wooden globes with glittering skies" (11) Shakespeare also recognizes this new era which redefines the concept of beauty: "In old age,. was the black not considered fair?/ But now he is the successive heir of black beauty,” which is a pun on “the hair” (Sonnet 127, 1, 3). Yet Kim F. Hall, in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, is correct in assuming that neither poet wishes his subject to be tainted; all poets praise the dark beauty of their women as long as it envelops an inner and superlative fairness. What she fails to explain is that this practice dates back to Alison, whose “skin is quite fair” although she is brunette (13). To compensate for his black eyes, the poet sings "Hire swire is whiter than the swan,/And the most.