The Shorter Poems, Page 2

  In Colin Clouts Come Home Againe as in The Shepheardes Calender amorous complaint encodes political discontent. Both works, like most of the Spenserian canon, are relentlessly dialectical and self-reflexive. In the Calender even Colin’s monologues give vent to the frustrated dialogues of a divided self, reflecting the persona’s own divided genesis in the garrulous, aggressive Colyn Cloute of John Skelton’s court satires and the pensive, elegiac Colin of Clément Marot’s plaintive pastorals. Writing his Observations on the Faerie Queene in 1754 Thomas Warton perceptively devoted a whole chapter to the unusual subject of ‘Spenser’s Imitations of Himself’ in the belief that it would help to illustrate ‘how variously he expresses the same thought’. But, as Warton himself demonstrates, the ‘thought’ is never quite the ‘same’. The Spenserian imagination is obsessively dialogical, constantly interrogating, revising and redacting its material in a diversity of contexts, genres and styles. And yet, the very strategies which appear to offer an escape from solipsism often serve to compound it. E.K.’s identification of Spenser with Colin Clout, ‘vnder which name this Poete secretly shadoweth himself’, is richly disingenuous, designed to make the unwary forget that Spenser created, and speaks through, all of the Calender’s other personae, that he engineered all of their conflicts and disagreements, that he shunned dialectical closure in his pastoral verse as thoroughly as he avoided narrative closure in his epic – or, for that matter, emotional closure in his love poetry. The Amoretti, for example, is distinguished from other sonnet sequences by the repetition of sonnet 35 as sonnet 83 – an astonishingly bold act of self-quotation which also serves as a trenchant act of self-revision. That it should be this sonnet and no other that is repeated is crucial: its subject is Narcissus and the repetition enacts the obsession. Self-quotation articulates, and effectively ironizes, self-love. The lady’s eyes which ideally serve as a window to her soul may become no more than ‘the myrrour’ of the speaker’s ‘mazed hart’ (sonnet 7). They may function as an avenue to emotional communion or an encouragement to solipsism. The delicate negotiation between two discrete selves, with which love is properly concerned, risks the imprisonment of both parties in their own self-images:

  Leaue lady in your glasse of christall clene,

  Your goodly selfe for euermore to vew:

  and in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane,

  most liuely lyke behold your semblant trew.

  (Amoretti, sonnet 45)

  The delicious paradox of ‘semblant trew’ encapsulates the psychological problem about which the Amoretti is constructed: the relation of image and self-image to reality, and the relevance, if any, of Plato’s ‘fayre Idea’ of love to the selfish, and self-consuming, hunger of appetite. The lover’s eyes are ‘hungry eyes’ and desire for another, bred in the ‘inner part’, consumes the self:

  Vnquiet thought, whom at the first I bred,

  Of th’inward bale of my loue pined hart:

  and sithens haue with sighes and sorrowes fed,

  till greater then my wombe thou woxen art.

  Breake forth at length out of the inner part,

  in which thou lurkest lyke to vipers brood:

  and seeke some succour both to ease my smart

  and also to sustayne thy selfe with food.

  (Amoretti, sonnet 2)

  At the heart of Spenserian self-assertion is self-qualification: ‘my selfe, my inward selfe I meane’. The startling imagery of a male ‘wombe’ threatens to confound the sexual distinction upon which the speaker’s desire is premised. The ‘art of eyes’ which he is called upon to master is also the art of conflicting egos (sonnet 21). Spenser is acutely aware of the tendency for love poetry to degenerate into the poetry of self-love, just as elegiac verse finds us ‘mourning in others, our owne miseries’ (Dolefull Lay of Clorinda, 96). Hence the inevitable ambiguity of a line such as ‘helpe me mine owne loues prayses to resound’ even in a poem intended to celebrate the mutuality of marriage (Epithalamion, 14). In his comment upon the ‘Emblem’ to the September eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, E. K. applies Narcissus’ motto ‘Inopem me copia fecit’ (plenty has made me poor) to ‘the author’ – ‘and to suche like effecte, as fyrste Narcissus spake it’. In The Faerie Queene Spenser speaks of reflecting Elizabeth Tudor ‘In mirrours more then one’ so that she may see ‘her selfe’ (3 Proem 5), but this is merely an extension of his preoccupation with anatomizing the whole notion of the ‘selfe’, with reflecting upon the chaotic emotional and intellectual fragmentation subsumed into the first person singular. The hope must be that, as An Hymne in Honovr of Beautie asserts, ‘two mirrours by opposd reflexion, / Doe both expresse the faces first impression’ (181–2), but the very concept of ‘opposd reflexion’ betrays the multiple contradictions involved in the complex phenomenon of self-consciousness, in the desperate anxiety to objectify the subjective and ‘see’ the elusive ‘inward selfe’. As a means to this end narrative personae proliferate in the shorter poems, and images of mirrors and echoes abound. Their close association is highly revealing. In classical mythology Echo was the maiden who died for unrequited love of a morbidly self-reflexive Narcissus: ‘So I vnto my selfe alone will sing, / The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring’ (Epithalamion, 17–18).

  It has become common to speak of Spenserian ‘self-fashioning’ but his tendency to undermine his self-image by habits of ‘opposd reflexion’, or to multiply conflicting self-images ‘in mirrours more then one’, has been relatively neglected. Far more is involved in such manoeuvres than a courtly game of hide-and-seek. Even such a practical matter as the pursuit of a patron, one of the dominant concerns of the shorter poems, entails scrutiny of the speaker’s fantastical alter egos which are constructed and deconstructed in ‘expectation vayne / Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away, / Like empty shaddowes’ (Prothalamion, 7–9). As Virgilian confidence struggles with Ovidian despair, the public poet often retreats, or represents himself as retreating, into the private man: ‘I play to please my selfe, all be it ill’ (June, 72). But this is a sentiment intended for publication and is ‘spoken’ not by Spenser but by Colin Clout. Though persistently auto-referential, the Spenserian ‘I’ is never truly autobiographical. Autobiography is the condition it never quite attains, auto-fabrication the condition it never quite escapes.

  In works such as The Shepheardes Calender and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe images of circularity abound, pitting ideals of fulfilment against experiences of entrapment. And it is not only the speaker who is entrapped but also the objects of his attention. Mother Hubberds Tale was called in upon its publication in 1591 even though it is likely that large parts of it had been written some dozen years earlier. But this is the Elizabethan equivalent of Animal Farm and Spenser’s analysis of the contemporary malaise proceeds beyond specific personalities to the very power structures of the Elizabethan regime. The sovereign lioness rejoices to see her favourite ‘beast’ romping about ‘enchaste with chaine and circulet of golde… buxome to his bands’, yet she is offended by the ‘late chayne’ which has been laid about his neck. She would have him both ‘wilde’ and ‘tame’ simultaneously, wholly bound to her yet somehow also ‘free’ (624–30). Depending on the dating of the passage, the allusion may refer either to the Earl of Leicester’s clandestine marriage to Lettice Knollys (1578) or to the Earl of Essex’s clandestine marriage to Frances Walsingham (1590). On the deepest level, however, it matters little which we choose. Because of her unmarried state Elizabeth (whose personal motto was ‘semper eadem’, always the same) was fated to recurrent disappointments of this nature, and the political dynamics of the Elizabethan court, vulnerable as they were to the emotional vicissitudes of fruitless courtship, were correspondingly unstable. What the poem exposes is not an isolated incident but an endemic condition, a vicious circle of sexual jealousy and political disarray.

  Given the force of such preoccupations, it is hardly surprising that the shorter poems so often gesture towards spiritual transcendence as a means of
escape from the world’s prevailing ‘vanitie’. The Fowre Hymnes (1596) conclude with what might well be interpreted as a programme for the redemption of Narcissus:

  Ah then my hungry soule, which long hast fed

  On idle fancies of thy foolish thought,

  And with false beauties flattring bait misled,

  Hast after vaine deceiptfull shadowes sought,

  Which all are fled, and now haue left thee nought,

  But late repentance through thy follies prief;

  Ah ceasse to gaze on matter of thy grief.

  (An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, 288–94)

  The object may have changed but the ‘hunger’ survives. But has the object actually changed? Or, as the persistence of mirror imagery suggests, is the object still the subject? Is the love of God any less self-referential than the love of woman? The structure of the Fowre Hymnes is rigorously dialectical and the relationship between ‘earthly’ and ‘heauenly’ love cannot be explained solely, or even principally, in terms of ascent or renunciation. The process, as Spenser tells us, is not one of recantation but of ‘retractation’, a complex operation of revision or redaction. The two ‘earthly’ hymns are not suppressed but republished, like Amoretti’s repeated sonnet, in a new context. The structure of the volume expands to embrace, rather than to deny, its internal contradictions. Evident throughout the ‘heavenly’ pair is the struggle to sublimate earthly desire, a hallowing of Eros which inevitably entails a sexualizing of Agape. Even the God of the heavenly hymns, constructed in the image of the earthly speaker’s ‘hungry’ desire, is a divine Narcissist who created man:

  In whom he might his mightie selfe behould:

  For loue doth loue the thing belou’d to see,

  That like it selfe in louely shape may bee.

  (An Hymne of Heavenly Love, 117–19)

  God sees himself in creation and creation strives to glimpse his image by gazing upon reflections of itself. ‘Rest’ may be the word upon which the hymns close, but the poetry thrives upon the disquietude of complex metaphysical thought.

  However fervent his aspirations towards perfection and stability, Spenser’s imagination was complicit with the depredations of time, with emotional dislocation, with exile, and ultimately with the ‘vanitie’ he castigates. His music draws strength from the breaking of Colin’s pipe, from the fall of Rome, the fate of butterflies and from the very corruption of Eliza’s court. Even in the Epithalamion, a rare poem of consummated desire, the speaker’s Orphic power is deliberately offset by darker resonances and echoes. The abrupt ending may even suggest that personal fulfilment entails poetic loss. E. K. divides the eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender into three distinct groups, the ‘plaintiue’, the ‘recreatiue’ and the ‘moral’, but the work itself challenges such distinctions. Plaintive ‘undersongs’ resound in recreative verse, moral issues intrude into matters of love, and a disturbingly ‘doolful pleasaunce’ is derived even from elegy. All of the ‘mirrours’ are carefully angled to enhance the most provocative effects of ‘opposd reflexion’. The biographer’s loss is the reader’s gain.

  The present edition contains all of Spenser’s shorter poetry including the important Latin verse which appeared in the Spenser-Harvey correspondence of 1580. A full translation from the Latin is supplied in the commentary. The various works are arranged in the chronological order of publication thereby affording the reader a clear overview of Spenser’s public career. As the headnotes point out, however, exact dates of composition are notoriously hard to determine and it is essential to bear this in mind when considering the issue of Spenser’s artistic development. The volume of Complaints published in 1591, for example, contains revisions of material that first appeared as early as 1569. The commentary is designed to alert the reader to problems such as these while at the same time facilitating immediate comprehension of difficult passages or terms. Because Spenser is such an aggressively inter-textual writer, freely adapting, and occasionally subverting, classical, biblical and contemporary materials, I have endeavoured to supply concise references to all of the most important sources and analogues. Comparison between such passages and the Spenserian texts will generally be found to throw considerable light upon the character of Spenser’s poetic craft and intellectual outlook. The headnotes are designed to examine some of the more general problems of interpretation arising from particular works, or collections of works, and to suggest various avenues of critical approach.

  As will be evident to those familiar with the history of Spenserian annotation, the commentary to the present edition is heavily reliant upon a wide range of scholarly authorities. So immensely rich is the editorial tradition that my contribution necessarily falls far short of my indebtedness, but this is very much in the nature of an exercise which seeks to consolidate past gains by a process of compilation, selection and synthesis. To edit Spenser is also to edit his editors. I acknowledge my obligations with gratitude; my errors are doubtless original. For the glossing of common nouns my single greatest debt is to the OED, valuably supplemented by C. G. Osgood, A Concordance to Spenser (1915). For classical allusions my principal sources are Natalis Comes, Mythologiae (1567), H. G. Lotspeich, Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (1942), N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1970) and Pierre Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology (1986). For plants and herbs I have drawn upon John Gerard, The Herbal or General Historie of Plantes (1597) and Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653). For political, historical and miscellaneous allusions (particularly in Complaints) my work is greatly indebted, as are all recent editions of Spenser, to the editors of The Works of Edmund Spenser. A Variorum Edition (1932–58). Classical sources have generally been cited from the relevant Loeb editions, and Shakespeare’s works from the Arden editions. The Bible has been consulted in both the Genevan and King James’s versions.

  Severe restrictions of space generally preclude the recording of specific attributions in the course of the commentary, but I have drawn with profit upon all of the following sources (listed in chronological order): John Jortin, Remarks on Spenser’s Poems (1734); Thomas Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (1754); the collected editions of Spenser’s Works by H. J. Todd (1805); F. J. Child (1864) and A. B. Grosart (1882–4); C. H. Herford (ed.), The Shepheards Calendar (1895); L. Winstanley (ed.), The Fowre Hymnes (1907); F. I. Carpenter, A Reference Guide to Edmund Spenser (1923); W. L. Renwick (ed.), Complaints (1928), Daphnaïda and Other Poems (1929) and The Shepheardes Calender (1930); H. S. V. Jones, A Spenser Handbook (1930); F. R. Johnson, A Critical Bibliography of the Works of Edmund Spenser Printed before 1700 (1933); E. Welsford, Spenser: ‘Fowre Hymnes’, ‘Epithalamion’: A Study of Edmund Spenser’s Doctrine of Love (1967); C. G. Smith, Spenser’s Proverb Lore (1970); A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene (1977); T. P. Roche, Jr (ed.), The Faerie Queene (Penguin English Poets, 1978); W. A. Oram, E. Bjorvand, R. Bond, T. H. Cain, A. Dunlop and R. Schell (eds.), The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (1989); A. C. Hamilton et al. (eds.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (1990); H. Maclean and A. L. Prescott (eds.), Edmund Spenser’s Poetry (3rd edn, 1993); D. Brooks-Davies (ed.), Edmund Spenser: Selected Shorter Poems (1995). I am also immensely grateful to the following scholars for their generous assistance with particular problems of interpretation: Mr Thomas Braun, Dr Susie Clark, Mr Sam Eidinow, Dr Steve Gunn, Dr Nicholas Richardson and Mr Colin Wilcockson.

  Epigrams.

  [1]

  Being one day at my window all alone,

  So many strange things hapned me to see,

  As much it grieueth me to thinke thereon.

  At my right hande, a Hinde appearde to me,

  5

  So faire as mought the greatest God delite:

  Two egre Dogs dyd hir pursue in chace,