Poems of the Week: Spenser

Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599) was one of the earliest major figures in English Renaissance poetry. He is well known, for example, for creating one of the three major forms of the sonnet: as I said in our earlier article on the sonnet, the Spenserian form has three quatrains, and a final rhymed couplet, but the rhyming scheme is interlocked: abab;bcbc;cdcd;ee. In 1595 he published Amoretti, a sonnet sequence; here is one of them that I quoted in that earlier article, Sonnet LXXV:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
      But came the waves and washed it away;
      Again I wrote it with a second hand,
      But came the tide and made my pains his prey,
“Vain man,” said she, “That dost in vain assay
      A mortal thing so to immortalize,
      For I myself shall like to this decay,
      And eke my name be wiped out likewise.”
“Not so,” quod I, “Let baser thing devise
      To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
      My verse your virtues rare shall eternize
      And in the heavens write your glorious name,
Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,
      Our love shall live, and later life renew.”

This is the first of the Sonnets in the collection, with the original spelling largely retained:

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
      which hold my life in their death dealing might
      shall handle you and hold in love’s soft bands
      lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
      those flashing eyes will deigne sometimes to look
      and reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
      written with teares in hearts close bleeding book.
And happy rymes bath'd in the sacred brooke,
      of Helicon from whence she derived is,
      when ye behold that Angels blessed looke,
      my soul’s long lacked food, my heaven’s bliss,
Leaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,
      whom if ye please, I care for other none.

The second poem for this week is another sonnet: as I have remarked before, most of the poets of this period were given to writing poems to young ladies on the general lines of Horace’s well-known ode, Book One, Number 11, usually referred to as Carpe Diem. Spencer was no exception, and his is called Whilst it is Prime.

Within a little over twenty years, a remarkable group of poets (and playwrights) of the English renaissance were writing: in addition to Spenser, Sydney (1554 – 1586), Marlowe (1564 – 1593), Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Donne (1573 – 1631), and Jonson (1573 – 1637). Shakespeare, of course, was responsible for another of the standard forms for sonnets; and for comparison, the early version of his sonnets were published in the first quarto edition in 1609. However, generally people publish collections of sonnets when they have a few, and generally it is not possible to determine when the first of these was published. Some textual research is in progress to try to get an idea of the probable dates for the Shakespeare sonnets; I do not know if there is any similar study for Spenser.

Spenser was born to a family of modest means; possibly his father was John Spenser, a free journeyman clothmaker resident in East Smithfield in London. However, there is little doubt that the family originated in Lancashire. He entered the Merchant Taylors’ School, probably in 1561 when it opened under the celebrated humanist Richard Mulcaster (1530 – 1611). Mulcaster was an important educator, and his theories relating to education were still current 250 years after his death. He was one of the first to emphasizing the teaching of the English language, as opposed to concentrating on the teaching of Latin and Greek. He set out in detail his views of the function of English in the new education, advocating, in particular, that scholars should devote themselves to the settling of the orthography, accidence and syntax of the language, that, thereby, English may claim its place side by side with Latin, whose merits of precision and elaboration he is foremost to perceive. For “I love Rome, but London better, I favour Italy, but England more, I honour Latin, but worship English.”

He was also a lover of football (“soccer”, in American parlance). It has been said that the schoolmaster Holofernes in Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour’s Lost, performed first in 1594, was based on Mulcaster. (For the trivia minded, Holofernes was commander of the Assyrian army who had his head chopped off by Judith: the story is in the apocryphal Book of Judith.) Later, Spenser said that Mulcaster and other staff at Merchant Taylor’s were the first to encourage him to write verse.

While at school, Spenser was supported at least in part by a generous bequest from Robert Nowell (d. 1569), a member of a prominent Lancashire family, who lived in Read Hall. There were three brothers: Alexander (d. 1601) was at the time Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral; and Lawrence (1520 – 1576) sometime Dean of Litchfield. Lawrence was also a scholar who compiled an Anglo-Saxon dictionary and, in 1563, had in his possession the Beowulf manuscript. He was for some time the tutor of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550 – 1604): there is a remote Shakespearean connection there, which the Mediadrome’s History Editor may well pursue at some time.

In May, 1569, Spenser left school and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College), Cambidge. A sizar was one of a body of students in the universities of Cambridge and Dublin, who, having passed a certain examination, were exempted from paying college fees and charges. He received an additional ten shillings from the Lowell bequest. He published English versions of poems by the 16th century French poet Joachim du Bellay, and of a French version of a poem by Petrarch in 1569, when he entered Pembroke Hall. While in Pembroke, Spenser made a number of influential friends, but the most important was his friendship with Gabriel Harvey (1550 – 1631). Harvey was at Christ’s Church in Cambridge for his bachelor’s degree (1556 – 1570), but in 1570 he received a Fellowship in Pembroke Hall, where he took his MA. (1570 – 1573). He too was a poet, and here is an almost sonnet of his: Gorgon, or The Wonderful Year:

St Fame dispos'd to cunnycatch the world,
Uproar'd a wonderment of Eighty Eight:
The Earth addreading to be overwhurld,
What now availes, quoth She, my ballance weight ?
The Circle smyl'd to see the Center feare :
The wonder was, no wonder fell that yeare.

Wonders enhaunse their powre in numbers odd:
The fatall yeare of yeares is Ninety Three :
Parma hath kist; De-maine entreates the rodd:
Warre wondreth, Peace and Spaine in Fraunce to see.
Brave Eckenberg, the dowty Bassa shames :
The Christian Neptune, Turkish Vulcane tames.

Navarre wooes Rome: Charlmaine gives Guise the Phy:
Weepe Powles, thy Tamberlaine voutsafes to dye.

L'envoy.

The hugest miracle remaines behinde ,
The second Shakerley Rash-Swash to binde.

This rather odd almost-sonnet (not, you will notice, in Spenserian form) appeared in a piece called A New Letter of Notable Contents, published in 1593. The whole piece was part of a rather savage argument between Harvey and Thomas Nashe (1567 – 1601). 1588 was the year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and 1593 was a major outbreak of the bubonic plague, which led to all the theatres in London being closed. However, there is an annotated version of this poem by Peter Farey (http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/gorgon.htm) which shows that these interpretations of the meanings of these dates in the poem is wrong.

It was not unusual for some political poems, or those concerned with personal vendettas, to be written in rather obscure language during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in part to avoid the possibility of prosecution. It should be remembered that the rather romantic view of her reign that is common nowadays is far from the truth: in fact, England at the time could be fairly described as a police state, as you will see later.

After Spenser took his B.A. (1573) and M.A.(1576), he left Cambridge for Kent, where he acted as secretary for John Young, who became Bishop of Rochester, after having been Master of Pembroke Hall. It was there that he wrote The Shepheardes Calendar, which was published in 1579. This “can be called the first work of the English literary Renaissance” (Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature). It consists of twelve eclogues, concerning each month. Here is the beginning, January, that describes a shepherd’s boy, Colin Clout, who is Spenser himself:

A Shepeheards boye (no better doe him call)
when Winters wastful spight was almost spent,
All in a sunneshine day, as did befall,
Led forth his flock, that had been long ypent.
So faynt they woxe, and feeble in the folde,
That now scarcely their feete could them uphold.

All as the Sheepe, such was the shepeheards looke,
For pale and wanne he was, (alas the while,)
May seeme he lovd, or els some care he tooke:
Well couth he tune his pipe, and frame his stile.
Tho to a hill his faynting flocke he ledde,
And thus him playnd, the while his shepe there fedde.

Entering into employment by the Earl of Leicester the following year, Spenser became friends with Sir Philip Sidney, Edward Dyer, and Fulke Greville. They formed a literary group called by Spenser the "Areopagus," and their talents were enlisted in supporting the cause of the Leicester faction in matters of religion and politics. The Shepheardes Calender appeared at the end of the year, in time to serve as, among other things, propaganda for the Leicester position on the Queen's proposed marriage with the Duc d'Alencon.

Spenser's printer, the radical Puritan propagandist Hugh Singleton, had in August or September of 1579 brought out The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England Is Like To Be Swallowed by Another French Marriage, If the Lord Forbid Not the Banes, by Letting her Maiestie See the Sin and Punishment Thereof by John Stubbs. Stubbs, his publisher William Page, and Singleton were all arrested and sentenced to have their right hands cut off. The sentence was carried out in November upon Stubbs and Page, but someone at Court procured a pardon for Singleton, who appears to have been a peripheral member of the Leicester group as well as a returned Marian exile. Undeterred, Singleton produced The Shepheardes Calender within a month of his narrow escape. Not until January of 1580 did Elizabeth write to Alencon to tell him the marriage was not to be.

Probably through Leicester’s influence, in July 1580 Spenser was appointed secretary to Arthur, fourteenth Lord Grey de Wilton, then leaving England to take up office as Lord Deputy of Ireland. Over the next few years, Spenser led an eventful life in Ireland. During his time he was writing what was to be his major work, The Faerie Queene, the first three books of which were published in London in 1590. Books IV to VI were entered in the Stationers’ Register in January, 1596.

By 1589 at the latest, he apparently had made the acquaintance of Sir Walter Ralegh, at that time living on his Munster estate, and serving as the mayor of the city Yougal. It was Ralegh who, reading through Spenser’s early draft of The Faerie Queene, encouraged him to join him on a trip to London in 1590, where he presented the celebrated poet to the Queen.

In 1596, he wrote Prothalamion; the word is derived from the Latin pro, meaning before, and thalamus, itself coming from the Greek. Originally, thalamus meant a room in the interior of a house, and then was principally applied to a woman’s bedroom. From this it became a marriage-bed, and finally marriage, and in this sense it was used by Virgil. ‘Prothalamion’ thus means a song or a poem to celebrate a forthcoming wedding, and in the case of Spencer’s poem it was a double wedding: the dedication reads:

In honour of the double mariage of the two Honorable & vertuous
Ladies, the Ladie Elizabeth and the Ladie Katherine
Somerset, Daughters to the Right Honourable the
Earle of Worcester and espoused to the two worthie
Gentlemen M. Henry Gilford, and
M. William Peter Esquyers.

This poem is our third poem of this week. It was included in The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, compiled by Francis Turner Palgrave, which was first published in1867. It also appeared in The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250 – 1918, chosen and edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; this was first published in 1900; my copy is the New Edition, which was published in 1939. The difference between these two versions is that Quiller-Couch largely uses Spenser’s original spelling, while the Palgrave version is modernized to the extent that that is possible consistent with the scansion and the rhyme. I have chosen to use the Palgrave version – I’m sure that’s a relief!

In September, 1598 Spenser was designated Sheriff of Cork; but in October Kilcolman was sacked by the forces of the Earl of Tyrone, and Spenser and his family fled to the city of Cork. He left Cork for England, carrying letters from Sir Thomas Norris to the Privy Council; but on the 13th of January, 1599, he died in Westminster. On the 16th of January he was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Earl of Essex paid for his funeral, and poets carried his coffin, throwing their verses and pens, along with many tears, into his grave. His tomb is next to that of Geoffrey Chaucer. In 1620 a monument to him was erected in the Abbey by Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset.

The term ‘Magnum Opus’ is often used for something that represents a couple of week’s work. In poetry, however, the term is used for landmarks: The Iliad; The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, Orlando Furioso, Gerusalemme Liberata. These last two were products of the Italian Renaissance, which led to the English literary Renaissance: Ludovico Ariosto (1474 – 1533) spent a large part of his life writing Orlando, which was published in 1532; Torquato Tasso (1544 – 1595) was regarded as the greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance, and he completed a first version of Jerusalem Delivered in 1575. It was not published until 1581. It is in this context that The Faerie Queene must be considered. The story of the poem is based on the Arthurian legends, but Spenser was careful to point out that it was an allegorical work. An allegory is a work written apparently about one subject, but having correspondences with another, which is the real target: for example, the stories in Gulliver’s Travels are really political commentary on the situation in Britain during Jonathan Swift’s (1667- 1745) time.

The Faerie Queen is an enormous work; my copy is the Penguin Classics edition, edited by Thomas P. Roche, Jr. with the assistance of C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr., and the poem itself is over 1,000 pages. It is divided into six books, and each book consists of twelve cantos. Each canto has approximately fifty verses.

It is in the verses themselves that Spenser makes his most interesting creation: the Spenserian Stanza. This consists of 9 iambic lines, the first eight being pentameter and the ninth a hexameter or alexandrine, rhyming ababbcbcc. This form has some similarity to the Italian ottava rima, although this was an eight-line stanza rhyming abababcc; this form was used by Boccaccio in the early fourteenth century, but the most famous use was by Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. However, Tasso also used it. The form was used by Byron in Don Juan, and by Keats in Isabella. Here is a stanza from Don Juan:

And Julia’s voice was lost, except in sighs,
      Until too late for useful conversation;
The tears were gushing from her gentle eyes,
      I wish, indeed they had not had occasion;
But who, alas! can love, and then be wise?
      Not that remorse did not oppose temptation:
A little still she strove, and much repented,
And whispering “I will ne’er consent”— consented.

Chaucer’s Rhyme Royal is also regarded as a precursor to the Spenserian Stanza, but this has seven decasyllabic lines rhyming ababbcc, first used by him in Troilus and Criseyde. After falling into disuse, it has been employed on occasion by modern poets: Auden, in Letter to Lord Byron, and John Masefield.

However, the article on the Spenserian Stanza in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics says:

“In Spenser’s hands it becomes distinctive, and one of the most original metrical innovations in the history of English verse. The stanza is perfectly suited to the nature of Spenser’s poem – at once dreamlike and intellectual, by turns vividly narrative and lushly descriptive –for it is short enough to contain sharply etched vignettes of action, and yet ample enough to lend itself to digression, description and comment.”

The form fell into disuse, but Byron used a variant in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Shelley in the Revolt of Islam and in Adonais showed him to be, in the words of the New Princeton Encyclopedia, the greatest master of the form since its creator. John Keats also used it in The Eve of St. Agnes:

      And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
      In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
      While he from forth the closet brought a heap
      Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
      With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
      And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
      Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
      From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

I don’t know if Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) had the Spenserian stanza in mind when he wrote, in An Essay on Criticism (1709):

Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees;
If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.
Then, at the last, and only Couplet fraught
With some unmeaning Thing they call a Thought,
A needles Alexandrine ends the Song,
That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.

Probably not, because his principal target was rhyming couplets. Pope did write a poem imitating Spenser, using the Spenserian stanza, entitled The Alley; it was published in 1727, but was written before 1709. Some of his poems imitating English poets were certainly written as early as 1701, when he was thirteen.

I feel that I have to give you some idea of what the great epic was like, and my first poem of the week therefore is the opening seven stanzas of The Faerie Queene. I know it will do no more than give you a taste of the poem; but this is always a problem when we discuss the major long epics. I have made some very small changes from the original text to make it a little more readable to a modern eye!

The poem is introduced by a Proem, an introductory four stanzas. In the Notes to the Thomas P. Roche edition, the editor remarks that the opening lines link Spenser and his poem to a tradition begun by Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70BCE – 19BCE). The Aeneid, Virgil’s great epic poem proper opens with the famous line:

Arma virumque cano

Or,

Of arms and the man I sing

but this is preceded by a four line introduction, which can be translated as:

I am that poet who in times past made the light melody of pastoral poetry.
In my next poem I left the woods for the adjacent farmlands,
Teaching them to obey even the most exacting tillers of the soil;
And the farmers liked my work. But now I turn to the terrible strife of Mars.

This translation is by W. F. Jackson Knight, in the Penguin Books edition of The Aeneid.

This describes the poet’s progress, beginning with the Eclogues, then the Georgics, and then to the epic Aeneid. Virgil was regarded in the Renaissance as the ideal poet, and this type of succession was thought to be the model for a serious poet: Spenser shows his own progress from the pastoral poem, The Shepheardes Calender, in this opening stanza to the Proem:

Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
      As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds,
      Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,
      For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
      And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
      Whose praises having slept in silence long,
      Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
      To blazon broad amngst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song.

This last line imitates the opening of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which was translated by Sir John Harrington in 1591 as:

Of Dames, of Knights,of armes, of love’s delight,
Of courtesies, of high attempts I speake,

So there you are. Much of what we have discussed in these columns have been shorter poems, and even the poets who have written longer works, as in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, have appeared in these pages largely through their shorter works. The giants of our trade are those who essayed the truly epic poems, and of these the sequence in the English language is short: Langland (perhaps), Chaucer, Spencer, and Milton. I wonder when we will see the next true English-language epic?