No Trial So Hard by Jayne English

“No trial is so hard to bear as a sense of sin.”

–– Valley of Vision, Confession and Petition

I was reading H.J. Massingham’s Poems About Birds and came to “The Nightingale” by Sir Philip Sidney. Even though I was only eight pages in, the poem stopped me. I couldn’t read more for days because I wanted time to think about this poem. Published in 1598, it’s one Emily Dickinson could have encountered that made her feel “…as if the top of my head were taken off.” It pierced to the soul.

Some critics consider the poem to be about unrequited love. But the intensity of its contrasts seems to indicate a deeper meaning.

If it is about unrequited love, it’s hard to justify the speaker declaring that his pain is greater than princess Philomela’s. In Greek mythology, Tereus raped Philomela, then cut out her tongue so she couldn’t tell anyone of his crime. Philomela cries out to the gods, who turn her into a nightingale to protect her from Tereus’ rage.

Sidney’s poem says Philomela, as the nightingale:

Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making,

And mournfully bewailing,

Her throat in tunes expresseth

What grief her breast oppresseth

For Tereus’ force on her chaste will prevailing.

Then the poem’s speaker seems to minimize Philomela’s suffering in the last four lines of the first stanza:

O Philomela fair, O take some gladness

That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness:

Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth;

Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.

We see how this experience would traumatize Philomela. How then could the speaker’s anguish of heart, unreturned love, be greater than her physical pain? He continues pressing his case against Philomela’s complaints, saying the violent attacks were merely “Tereus’ love”:

Alas, she hath no other cause of anguish

But Tereus’ love, on her by strong hand wroken,

Wherein she suffering, all her spirits languish,

Full womanlike complains her will was broken.

In the next stanza, he further diminishes the attack by calling it “too much having” and making the shocking declaration that it is a lesser crime than the speaker’s “wanting”:

But I, who daily craving,

Cannot have to content me,

Have more cause to lament me,

Since wanting is more woe than too much having.

This sharp contrast between her tragedy and his heartbreak calls for a deeper reading than just seeing the poem about unrequited love.

Because Sidney was an adherent of the Reformed faith, we can read the poem through a biblical lens. This is what makes it profoundly moving. When reading it this way, the “juster cause” for sadness is not being spurned by an earthly love, but spurning God’s love—a tragedy with eternal consequences.

This then makes the thorn that invades the speaker’s heart sin that separates him from a holy and loving God. Spurning God’s love is a desperate reality worse than Philomela’s experience. Her physical, temporal wounds and trauma will melt away in the light of glory; but if we read the speaker’s thorn as sin separating him from God, it will drive him away from God for all time. His lamenting the thorn gives the poem both pathos and hope and shows him longing to be rid of sin. As cold as it sounds to call Tereus’ attack “too much having,” the true tragedy is to be left “wanting” or lacking fellowship with Christ, the Beloved Lord and Savior.

The speaker without Christ is “daily craving,” and nothing in the world will satisfy him. Repeating the last four lines of the first stanza at the end of the poem in this reading highlights the poem’s contrast. It calls for Philomela and us to see the “juster cause of plaintful sadness” as the thorn representing sin:

O Philomela fair, O take some gladness,

That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness:

Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth;

Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.

Unrequited love is painful, but reading this poem as not returning Christ’s love is what gives it power. When the heart pierced with sin realizes, as the apostle Paul puts it, “that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us,” sorrows, even like Philomela’s, can turn to eternal hope and the ultimate joy.

Our Beloved hears our weeping and lamenting and, as He does for the nightingale, makes them songs in the night.

Prayer

From Valley of Vision

Day 7: Confession and Petition

I thank thee for thy wisdom and thy love,

for all the acts of discipline to which I am subject,

for sometimes putting me into the furnace

to refine my gold and remove my dross.

No trial is so hard to bear as a sense of sin.

If thou shouldst give me choice to live in pleasure and keep my sins,

or to have them burnt away with trial,

give me sanctified affliction.

The Nightingale

by Sir Philip Sidney

The nightingale, as soon as April bringeth

Unto her rested sense a perfect waking,

While late bare earth, proud of new clothing, springeth,

Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making,

And mournfully bewailing,

Her throat in tunes expresseth

What grief her breast oppresseth

For Tereus’ force on her chaste will prevailing.

O Philomela fair, O take some gladness,

That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness:

Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth;

Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.

Alas, she hath no other cause of anguish

But Tereus’ love, on her by strong hand wroken,

Wherein she suffering, all her spirits languish;

Full womanlike complains her will was broken.

But I, who daily craving,

Cannot have to content me,

Have more cause to lament me,

Since wanting is more woe than too much having.