Point of View

The majority of the sonnets in the sequence are told from the first-person point-of-view of Astrophel, the speaker. As such, the reader receives a relatively skewed portrait of the vague narrative that gets threaded throughout the sequence, as events are often marred or reframed by Astrophel's own perceptions about what happened and how it makes him feel. The essential "plot" of the sequence is that Astrophel sees Stella, falls in love, pursues her, briefly wins her affection, and is ultimately rejected by her. However, by framing the sequence through Astrophel's perspective, the narrative becomes much less straightforward and able to follow, rendering the sequence more about Astrophel's psychological state than anything else.

The songs, however, tend to offer a third-person perspective of the events, which gives the reader an outside point-of-view by which they can judge Astrophel's reflections in the sonnets. The songs - some...