At court, as well, his career seems to have been overshadowed by the brilliant elder brother.ДЄfter Philip was mortally wounded, he was cared for by Robert until his death. Exhorted constantly by his father to follow Philip's example, he may well have lacked complete confidence in his own writing projects. Their achievements might help explain why Robert confined himself to the private circulation of his work. Philip was Robert's elder brother by nine years: there was also the talented younger sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, the dedicatee of Robert's collection. There must have been a certain amount of sibling rivalry in the Sidney establishment. Croft's magnificent edition of The Poems of Robert Sidney is essential reading, not only for students of Elizabethan literature but for anyone generally interested in poetry and poetics. The collection had been misattributed, but Sidney's spiky italic handwriting was identified by the Cambridge scholar Peter Croft, who went on to become the poet's first editor.

Sidney's poems, handwritten in a notebook, with a leather binding added in the 19th century, came to notice in the 1960s, when the contents of the library of Warwick Castle were dispersed. It's untitled, but numbered 'Sonnet 30', and begins, aptly for a re-emergent poet, 'Absence, I cannot say thou hid'st my light вЂ¦ '

This week's poem comes from a collection of sonnets, songs, pastorals, elegies and epigrams by the newly-rediscovered Elizabethan poet, Robert Sidney.