SOURCE: "A Feeling Skill," in The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney: An Interpretation in the Context of His Life and Times, Liverpool University Press, 1974, pp. 136-54.

In the following excerpt, Nichols analyzes several sonnets from Astrophil and Stella and contends that they demonstrate that Sidney was a master of meter and a precise, imaginative poet.

One of the fascinations of any sonnet-sequence is the pull between our inclination to read each sonnet as a self-contained poem and our knowledge that it is also part of a larger whole. To revert to the metaphor of Astrophil and Stella as a play—each sonnet has its own distinctive personality, and this personality interacts with the personalities of the other sonnets. Such a comment as this is particularly relevant to Astrophil and Stella: 'Every sonnet is a compressed drama, and every sonnet-sequence is a greater drama built up of such dramatic...