Author: Henry Tan, Heritage High School
📍Vancouver, Washington

In “Thou Blind Man’s Mark”, author Sir Phillip Sidney uses contrasting sounds and varies the rhythm of the poem to convey that Desire is a perpetual mechanism that drives all acts, sinful and virtuous. 

Throughout this poem, Sidney uses differing cacophonous and euphonious sounds to represent that the speaker believes that he has defeated desire. The first line of this poem, “Thou blind man’s mark, thou fool’s self-chosen snare,” is filled with strong, forceful consonant sounds. This can also be seen in the second line, when Sidney writes “Fond fancy’s scum, and dregs of scattered thought;”. The use of these strong, forceful sounds that, when read together, do not flow smoothly, is meant to represent the speaker in the past, when he, in his eyes, was still consumed by desire. In this section, the use of these sounds show that he is reprimanding desire for tricking him and trapping him. His descriptions of desire also use the same strong, cacophonous sounds, which show the speaker’s disdain for desire. This can be seen when Sidney writes, “… cradle of causeless care;” to describe desire. The repeated use of the strong “c” sound contributes to the speaker’s description of desire as evil and manipulative. This initial description of desire in the earlier parts of the poem can be contrasted with the final three lines of this poem, which use much softer, euphonious sounds that make the lines flow with each other. For example, twelfth and thirteenth lines, which are the third-to-last and second-to-last lines in this poem, respectively, are written as such: “For virtue hath this better lesson taught—/ Within myself to seek my only hire,”. Both of these lines use soft consonant sounds that are comfortable to read. This represents how the speaker believes that he has overcome and defeated desire and has reached a state of mind similar to the effect of these smoother sounds on the poem: content and stable. However, the final line of this poem returns to using the forceful consonant sounds of the first section. In this line, which is written, “Desiring naught but how to kill desire.”, the “k” and “n” sounds at the beginning of “kill” and “naught” are strong and forceful, indicating that although he thinks he has overcome his desires and reached a state of contentment, his desire to kill Desire is like any other desire and he is still caught by Desire’s “snare”, which was making him miserable in the beginning of the poem. 

Next, to represent that the speaker has succumbed to desire, Sidney varies the rhythm of the poem to show the pull desire has on the speaker that the speaker will never be able to escape. Most of this poem is written without enjambment but Sidney does enjamb a couple of lines to slow down the pace of the poem. For example, the line, “ Desire, desire! I have too dearly bought,” is an enjambed line that follows four lines that are written without enjambment. Similarly, to change the pace of the poem after the volta in line 9, Sidney repeats the phrase, “In vain thou” to speed the poem up, and similarly enjambs the final three lines. The enjambment of the final three lines comes in the section where the speaker thinks he has freed himself from desire. This enjambment seems to indicate the opposite, however. The third-to-last and second-to-last lines flow very quickly as a result of this enjambment, causing the readers to move on from them quickly. These lines are the fastest moving lines in this poem and feed into the final line, which reads, “Desiring naught but how to kill desire.”, and in turn, work to emphasize this final line, emphasizing the idea that he does still desire something, which is to kill desire.  

Sidney’s use of contrasting sounds and varied rhythm throughout this poem work to show that the speaker has not actually defeated desire, as he believes, but, rather, continues to be consumed by it.