Sidney’s Penetrations: Metaphors and Ideas

This essay analyzes how Sidney uses the metaphor of “penetration” to explore the moral and psychic effects of the encounter between poem and reader. I contextualize Sidney’s use of this metaphor, starting from a moment in the Lady of May, where the pedant Rombus reflects on the “penetrancy” of pastoral singing. Invoking both classical and Christian contexts, the term represents rhetorical force as violent and invasive, yielding different affordances than other Elizabethan metaphors for poetic influence (such as digestion, movement, or temptation). Sidney himself adopts this metaphor to yoke together two incommensurate and perhaps mutually unintelligible subject positions: penetrated and penetrator, piercing and being pierced. I juxtapose a reading of Barnabe Barnes’s use of the same metaphor, closing with a reading of the bower in the old Arcadia. In so doing, I hope to offer an alternative account of how Sidney thinks with metaphor, emphasizing not how he resolves his central tensions but rather how he sustains incompatible readings. Our disagreements over Sidney’s views of reading, of morality, and of the relation between beauty and virtue result from his poetics of metaphor and wit. [M.H.]