Henry Constable

Henry Constable was a Scottish poet associated with the flowering of the English sonnet sequence during the reign of Elizabeth I. Diana: Elizabethan Sonnet Cycle presents poems of desire, praise, absence, and spiritual tension through the formal discipline of linked sonnets. First circulated in the 1590s, the collection participated in the literary fashion encouraged by Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella while developing its own musical and devotional qualities. Constable spent considerable time outside Britain after converting to Catholicism, and political suspicion complicated both his movements and his later life. His verse appeared in manuscripts and printed miscellanies as well as under his own name. Diana: Elizabethan Sonnet Cycle is central to his reputation because it shows how closely courtly love language could approach religious meditation. The poems repeatedly revise the speaker’s understanding of beauty, loyalty, and constancy. Constable’s careful patterns of rhyme and argument place him among the accomplished, if less frequently read, sonneteers of the Elizabethan period.