To Sleep, Perchance to Dream, with Lady Mary Wroth
Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, begins in the dark and by the end of this first section we are studying, P36 (within Song 5), remains in the dark but with the poet no longer merely describing mythological figures’ actions in her dream, but also taking action herself. P1 begins, “When nights black mantle could most darknes prove, / And sleepe deaths Image did my senceses hiere / From knowledg of my self, then thoughts did move / Swifter then those most switnes need require” (page 85). In P36, the poem’s speaker is “Hopeing for rest” (page 105).
In the dream state of P1, the speaker encounters Venus, goddess of love, fully active, driving a chariot, while in P36, hoping for a dream, the speaker encounters “Fortune” who is “blinded.” In the dream state of P1, then, the figures with whom she interacts is active, while she is in “deaths Image”; in the awake state of P36, she herself takes action, “obeying” (“I her obay’d) Fortune and “rising.” She “felt that love / Indeed was best, when I did least itt move.”
To that end, then, I am identifying motion–or lack thereof–as well as the active state–or lack thereof–as themes which I will watch for in the remainder of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Here, in P36, it is apparent that Pamphilia/Wroth has identified movement, or taking action with regard to love, as detrimental to love. The best love, is that which she does not attempt to move or control. Rather, she is banishing “all clowds of doubt,” destroying “all fears,” and letting love “depend” on “fortune” (page 105).
It is in this conflict between the states of sleep and awake, and between stillness and moving, that Pamphilia to Amphilanthus turns. Pamphilia wakes from her dream with Venus in P1, and arises from her encounter with Fortune in P36, with lessons to obey: the first of which she does not quite accept–“I, waking, hop’d as dreams itt would departt”–the second which she “obay’d” and, apparently willingly, gleaned a lesson from.
Works Cited
Mary Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” P1-P36 (Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, 85-105)
