Unrequited Love

The speaker makes it clear that his reason for writing is that he is in love with a woman, Stella (though in this poem she is not referred to by name), who is either unaware of his feelings or has rejected him in the past. Sidney was one of the earliest sonnet-writers in the English Renaissance, and this was a common theme inherent to the form, which sonneteers like Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey introduced to English from the Italian works of Francisco Petrarcha ("Petrarch"). Petrarch's sonnets detailed his own love for a woman named Laura, and often included descriptions of isolation, crippling sadness, and part-by-part descriptions of the body known as a blazon. These conventions have become known as "tropes" of the sonnet form, which some early modern writers – including William Shakespeare – eventually satirized in their own sonnets. As for...