Robert Sidney's love poetry is full of battle wounds, not unsurprisingly
since most of it was probably written while he was serving in the Low
Countries, but the most provocative instance in relation to his brother's
death is Sonnet 26:
'Ah dearest limbs, my life's best joy and stay,
How must I thus let you be cut from me,
And losing you, myself unuseful see,
And keeping you, cast life and all away,'
Full of dead gangrenes doth the sickman say
Whose death of part, health of the rest must be;
Alas, my love, from no infections free,
Like law doth give of it or my decay.
My love, more dear to me than hands or eyes,
Nearer to me than what with me was born,
Delayed, betrayed, cast under change and scorn,
Sick past all help or hope, or kills or dies;
While all the blood it sheds my heart doth bleed
And with my bowels I his cancers feed.
Gavin
At 17:07 28/04/2005, you wrote:
>Hi -- after reading posthumous poems on P. Sidney, I've suddenly
>become interested in the poetic treatment of war wounds in the
>early modern period, esp. with reference to him. I understand that
>War in the Renaissance is a critical genre unto itself, but has
>anybody written about the literary treatment of wounds, esp. as
>concerns (literally) deconstructive metaphors, phantom limbs,
>etc.?
>
>On that same note, why do we so rarely (ever?) read "CCCHA" in
>the context of the Sidneiana originally printed with it? --Tom H.
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