Despair and subjectivity in the erotic verse of Sidney and of Donne

The presence of despair in Donne's and Sidney's erotic verse, when considered in relation to both court and sexual politics in the Tudor period, is not merely a response to public and private life. In Donne's "Elegie VI, "Elegie VII, and "Elegie III - Change" and in Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" despair is inextricably linked to issues of self-definition and identity, power and control over self and others, and isolation and exile. Donne's and Sidney's representations of despair focus on the construction of the speaker as an identity and the effect despair has on that definition of identity. Ultimately, the presence of despair in the poetry of Donne and Sidney signals the realization of a perceived or actual threat to the self-definition of identity. Despair operates as a response to an individual's awareness of his powerlessness and his inability to define adequately his identity within a political discourse containing a demonstrably more powerful identity who possesses a greater degree of control and who is thereby in a position to exercize this power of definition over his identity. Despair exists within the poetry as an emblem not merely of the failure of each speaker's attempt to be the sole defining agent of his identity but also of the speaker's consciousness of that inherent failure.