ABSTRACT
The relevance of the “siren tears” in Sonnet 119 has been invariably overlooked by critics. Although some editors annotate the Homeric source behind the siren (Odyssey XII), no commentary of 119 against the backdrop of the Renaissance Homeric tradition has yet been attempted. This essay aims to fill this lacuna by proving that the sonnet articulates allegorical and symbolic implications similar to other related poems Ronsard, Du Bellay, Barnes or Spenser. Without doing violence to either the poem or the sequence, I suggest that both are underwritten by a homerotic drive, a distinctively male yearning to achieve homosocial serenity after a trying diversion in absorbing, deceptive, female sexuality. The analysis, conducted in dialectical fashion (Hegel, Adorno, Žižek), stresses the role of narrative in the sequence.
