Part III: The Modern Version of Astrophil and Stella #2

If I were to teach this sonnet, I'd teach it out of the Oxford paperback edition of Sidney's Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Here's the way that text represents the sonnet:

Not at first sight, nor with a dribbed~ shot,
Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed:
But known worth~ did in mine of time proceed,
Till by degrees it had full conquest got.
I saw, and liked; I liked, but loved not;
I loved, but straight did not what love decreed:
At length, to love's decrees I, forced, agreed,
Yet with repining at so partial lot.
Now even that footstep of lost liberty
Is gone, and now like slave-born Muscovite~
I call it praise to suffer tyranny;
And now employ the remnant of my wit
To make myself believe that all is well,
While with a feeling skill I paint~ my hell.

So: what are the instructive differences between this version, my recollected version, and the first published version? Right off the bat, my recollection and this version seem much more similar. (There's a reason for that: I memorized the sonnet out of this edition a few years ago). Still, my version has evolved: I'm clearly influenced by the dash-happiness of Emily Dickinson, for example, and I use dashes instead of colons or semi-colons to enhance the feelings of rushed enjambment in the sonnet. This might be because I memorize by reading out loud--giving me a different perspective on line breaks. I tend to see them less as caesuras than as flexible sluice-control devices, if that makes sense.

Secondly, and less obviously, my version isn't staking an authority claim. Both the Oxford edition and the 1591 edition are framing themselves as authoritative presentations of the sonnet--either through a preface, explaining the care and research that informs the sonnet text, or through the scholarly apparatus of endnotes (~ marks here) seeking to explain the precise meaning of potentially confusing words. My edition, conversely, doesn't claim authoritative status. It will never be cited or consulted in classes, and it has no historical cachet. Instead, it acts as a digital performance--one iteration of a personalized, remembered recitation, reflecting one specific personal interaction with the text. Here, my version starts to cross over into manuscript culture, even though I'm typing this in a new print medium. If I can internalize, modify, and re-iterate this sonnet on a blog that functions like a miscellany, then I'm doing an altered version of an early modern practice: compiling and rewriting texts, in the context of other texts, for my own purposes. While my version of the piece has different punctuation and wording than the others, then, it also represents a slightly different approach to poetry itself.