With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies! Analysis

If you haven't read it by now, you should know first off that this poem, what with its 14 lines and iambic pentameter, is a sonnet. There are several different types of sonnets, but this one, for t...

Astrophel—that's his name. It's an interesting name, no doubt, especially when you find out that "astro" means "star," and "phel" comes from a Greek root meaning "love." So that means… the love...

Let's see here… well, the moon is climbing the sky, so this poem is most likely taking place at—wait for it—night. Yes, it is true that you can see the moon early in the morning as well, but...

This poem doesn't just sound like one thing. You hear a whole bunch of sounds going on here. In the first eight lines, the speaker really sounds like the moon's sympathetic pal. Pretend the moon sh...

"With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!" is a pretty mysterious title if there ever was one. To be fair to the title, it's not really the title in the traditional sense. Like many son...

This song could be totally be Sidney's theme song because, well, his poetry in Astrophel and Stella is all about how love really, really… hurts sometimes. In this poem, for example, the refe...

This poem is no walk in the park, that's for sure. While Sidney is very kind when it comes to word choice (no super-weird words that nobody really uses, for example), his sentences are tricky—sin...

Sidney was the Renaissance equivalent of Tiger Woods, or Michael Jordan, or Ray Lewis—any awesome athlete. He was an excellent horse rider, and always conducted himself well in tournaments (you k...

Frustration, pain, sadness, love—those are the feelings and emotions on display in this poem. There's no lust, sexual desire, lechery at all. That means this isn't a sexual poem at all. Still, th...

Cupid (Eros), son of Venus (Aphrodite) (4)Lady Penelope Devereux, perhaps (throughout)