SOURCE: “Sidney's Classical Meters,” in Modern Language Notes, April 1955, pp. 254–55.

In the following essay, Appelgate corrects Theodore Spencer's error in identifying the form of the poem “When to my deadlie pleasure.”

The pseudo-quantitative English verses which enjoyed a brief fad in Elizabethan literary circles are generally an unlovely lot, and the late Professor Theodore Spencer was right to observe the relative merit among them of one of Sidney's efforts, a poem beginning, “When to my deadlie pleasure,” which appears among the Certaine Sonets of the 1598 folio.¹ Spencer, however, unaccountably mistook its form; he analyzes it according to the pseudo-Anacreontic pattern s – s – s – –, remarking that “Sidney himself calls [this poem] ‘Anacreon's kind of verses.’”² Sidney's identification, with notation of the pattern, is attached not to the poem which Spencer discusses but to one beginning, “My Muse, what ailes this Ardoure?” which appears in the Old Arcadia.³ “When to...