The Poetry of Spenser

THE life of Spenser extended from the years 1552 to 1599, a period which experienced a conflict of elementary intellectual forces more stimulating to the emotions and imagination than, perhaps, any other in the history of England. Throughout Europe, the time-honoured system of society which had endured since the age of Charles the Great was undergoing a complete transformation. In Christendom, so far as it was still Catholic, the ancient doctrines of the church and the scholastic methods of interpreting them held their ground in general education; but the weakening of the central basis of authority caused them everywhere to be applied in different ethical senses. In a larger measure, perhaps, than any country, English society was the stage of religious and political conflict. As the leader of the protestant nations, England was surrounded by dangers that presently culminated in the sending of the Spanish armada. Her ancient nobility, almost destroyed by the wars of the Roses, had been supplanted by a race of statesmen and courtiers called into existence by the crown, and, though the continuity of Catholic tradition was still preserved, the sovereign, as head of the church, exerted almost absolute power in the regulation of public worship. The poet whose name is rightly taken as representative of the general movement of literature in the first half of Elizabeth’s reign was well fitted by nature to reflect the character of this spiritual conflict. A modest and sympathetic disposition, an intelligence philosophic and acute, learned industry, a brilliant fancy, an exquisite ear, enabled Spenser’s genius to respond like a musical instrument to each of the separate influences by which it was stirred. His mind was rather receptive than creative. All the great movements of the time are mirrored in his work. In it is to be found a reverence for Catholic tradition modified by the moral earnestness of the reforming protestant. His imagination is full of feudal ideas, warmed into life by his association with men of action like Sidney, Grey, Ralegh and Essex, but coloured by a contrary stream of thought derived from the philosophers of the Italian renascence. Theological conceptions, originating with the Christian Fathers, lie side by side in his poetry with images drawn from pagan mythology, and with incidents of magic copied from the medieval chroniclers. These imaginative materials are, with him, not fused and assimilated in a form of direct poetic action as is the case in the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton; but, rather, are given an appearance of unity by an allegory, proceeding from the mind of the poet himself, in a mould of metrical language which combines native words, fallen out of common use, with a syntax imitated from the great authors of Greece and Rome. In respect of what was contributed to the art of Spenser by his personal life and character, it is often difficult to penetrate to the reality of things beneath the veil of allegory with which he chooses to conceal his thoughts. We know that he was born in London in 1552, the son of a clothier whose descent was derived from the same stock as the Spencers of Althorp. To this connection the poet alludes in his pastoral poem Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, when, praising the three daughters of Sir John Spencer, he speaks of

The honor of the noble familie: Of which I meanest boast my selfe to be.

We know, also, that he was one of the first scholars of the recently founded Merchant Taylors’ school, from which he passed as a sizar to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, on 20 May, 1569. Furthermore, it is evident, from the sonnets contributed, in 1569, to A Theatre for Worldings, that he must have begun early to write poetry. Spenser was strongly influenced by the religious atmosphere of his college. Cambridge protestantism was, at this time, sharply divided by the dispute between the strict disciplinarians in the matter of church ritual, headed by Whitgift, master of Trinity, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, and those followers of Cartwright, Lady Margaret professor of Divinity, from whom, in course of time, came forth the Martin Marprelate faction.

But, however staunchly he held to the principles of the reformed faith, his protestantism was modified and softened by another powerful movement of the time, namely, the study of Platonic philosophy. The revival of Platonism which began with the renaissance was the natural antithesis to the system of Aristotelian logic, as caricatured by the late schoolmen; but it was also distinct from the Christianised Neo-Platonism which culminated in the IX c., when Joannes Scotus (Erigena) popularised the doctrines of the so-called Dionysius the Areopagite, embodied in his book The Celestial Hierarchy. Modern Platonism implied an interpretation of the Scriptures in the light of Plato’s philosophy studied, generally, at the fountain head, and particularly in the dialogues of The Republic, Timaeus and the Symposium. Originated in the Platonic academy at Florence by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, it was taken up by the reforming party throughout Europe, and was especially favoured in the universities of Paris and Cambridge.

After taking his B.A. degree in 1573, and proceeding to his M.A. degree in 1576, he seems to have left the university, and to have paid a visit of some length to his relatives in Lancashire. There, he probably made the acquaintance of the unknown lady who, in his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey, in The Shepheards Calender and in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, is celebrated under the name of Rosalind. There is nothing in the pastoral allusions to her indicating that Spenser’s attachment involved feelings deeper than were required for literary panegyric. Since the time of Petrarch, every woman commemorated by Italian or English poets had been of one type, beautiful as Laura, and “cruel” enough to satisfy the standing regulations prescribed by the old courts of love. His Amoretti or sonnets, written in praise of the lady whom he married towards the close of his life, are no better than the average compositions of the class then fashionable. The “cruelty” of Rosalind, probably not much more really painful to the poet than that caused in his later years by “Elisabeth,” was recorded in a more original form, in so far as it gave him an opportunity of turning his training in Platonic philosophy to the purposes of poetical composition. His two Hymnes in honour of Love and Beautie, though not published till 1596, were the product of his “green youth,” and it may reasonably be concluded that they were among the earliest of his surviving works. The poet, however, by showing how truly he himself comprehended the philosophy of Love and felt his power, conveyed an ingenious compliment to his mistress:

Love, that long since hast to thy mighty powre Perforce subdude my poor captivëd hart, And, raging now therein with restlesse stowre, Doest tyrannize in everie weaker part; Faine would I seeke to ease my bitter smart By any service I might do to thee, Or ought that else might to thee pleasing bee.

Love, he thinks, would doubtless be best pleased with an exposition of the doctrines of true love: hence his elaborate analysis of the passion, in which he follows, step by step, the Symposium of Plato, or, rather, Ficino’s commentary on that dialogue. Spenser, taking up Ficino’s reasoning about the two ages of Love, combines it with the mythological account of Love’s birth reported by Socrates from Diotima in the Symposium. After spending some time in Lancashire, he was brought south, through the influence of his friend, and employed in the service of the earl of Leicester. In this capacity, he made the acquaintance of Leicester’s nephew, Philip Sidney, whose ardent imagination and lofty spirit greatly stimulated him in the prosecution of his poetical designs. He became one of an “Areopagus”, in which Sidney and Dyer were the leading spirits, and the prime object of which was to naturalise in the language a system of versification based on quantity. He himself ventures on some experiments in this direction so wretched in execution as to remove all grounds for wonder at the poor quality of his compositions in Latin verse. Whatever were the precise reasons that determined Spenser to make his first poetical venture in the region of pastoral poetry, there can be no doubt that he must have perceived the opportunities afforded to invention by the practice of his literary predecessors. In the first place, the eclogue gave great scope for allegory.

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The Shepheards Calender was published in 1579. It was dedicated to “The Noble and Vertuous Gentleman, worthy of all titles both of Learning and Chevalrie, M. Philip Sidney.” With characteristic diffidence, the poet hesitated in giving his work to the world, partly from the fear, as he confesses in a letter to Harvey, of “cloying the noble ears” of his patron, and thus incurring his contempt, partly because the poem itself was written in honour of a private person, and so might be thought “too base for his excellent Lordship.” Sidney hastened to show that these apprehensions were groundless, by bestowing high praise on The Shepheards Calender, in his Defence of Poesie, qualified, indeed, by one important censure: “That same framing of his style to an olde rusticke language, I dare not allow: since neither Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazara in Italian, did affect it.” For the age of Elizabeth it bore immediate fruit. On the one hand, Sidney’s praise gave a vogue to the pastoral style; on the other, his censure of rusticity in language warned those who attempted the pastoral manner off Spenser’s example. Drayton, in his Eclogues, while preserving the clownish nomenclature of The Shepheards Calender, takes care to make his speakers discourse in the language of polished literature.

Spenser would have confined himself to a rendering of the traditional idea of pastoral love adapted to the changes of the different seasons; but, as a mater of fact, the unity of the design lies solely in an allegorical calendar, treated ethically, in agreement with the physical characteristics of the different months. The idea of love is presented prominently only in four of the eclogues, viz. those for January, March, June and December: of the rest, four, those for February, May, July and September, deal with matters relating to morality or religion; two are complimentary or elegiac, those for April and November; one, that for August, describes a singing match pure and simple; and one, that for October, is devoted to a lament for the neglect of poetry. It we look away from the authorised account of Spenser’s design in The Shepheards Calender to the actual gestation of the poem in his imagination, it is plain that, before constructing his general idea, he had carefully studied the pastoral practice of Theocritus, Bion, Vergil, Mantuan and Marot. For this purpose, he chose, as the basis of his entire work, an allegory founded on the widely popular Kalendrier des Bergers —a almanac describing the tasks of shepherds in the different months of the year—and resolved to include within his poetical edifice the various subjects hitherto handled in the eclogue. In dealing with the subject of love, he naturally took as his models the Greek and Latin idyllists, who had preceded him with many complaints of shepherds unfortunate in their wooing. But the direct expression of passion by these pagan poets had to be harmonised with the sub-tone of Platonism imported into amorous verse by the troubadours and Petrarch. Colin Clout, the love-lorn shepherd, whose lamentations run, more or less, through all seasons of the year, has been treated by Rosalind, “the widowe’s daughter of the glenne,” with the “cruelty” prescribed to ladies in the conventional rules of the courts of love and utters his despair, in the winter months of January and December. His feelings are much more complex than those ascribed for example, by Theocritus to the lover of Amaryllis, and, in the following stanza, it is plain that the pastoral sentiment has been transferred from the fields to the artificial atmosphere of court life:

A thousand sithes I curse that carefull hower Wherein I longd the neighbour towne to see, And eke tenne thousand sithes I blesse the stoure Wherein I sawe so fayre a sight as shee: Yet all for naught: such sight hath bred my bane. Ah, God! that love should breede both joy and payne!

Again, in the complaint of Colin in December, the essential motive is distinctly literary: it lies much less in the lover’s pain than in the recollections of his untroubled youth, that is to say, in a passage of this character in Marot’s Eglogue au Roy, which Spenser has very closely imitated. So, also, in the March eclogue, where the dialogue is carried on between two shepherds called Thomalin and Willie, the real motive is to imitate Bion’s second idyll—containing a purely pagan conception of love—in the rustic style specially devised by Spenser for his speakers. The result is not very happy. Bion’s idyll is, really, an epigram. It describes how a boy fowler spied Love sitting like a bird on a tree, and how he vainly endeavoured to ensnare him with all the arts he had lately learned. The boy relates his want of success to an old bird-catcher who had taught him, and is bidden to give over the chase, since, when he attains to man’s estate, instead of trying to catch Love, he will regret being caught by him. Spenser’s imitation of this is comparatively clumsy. He represents two young shepherds talking together in a manner befitting the spring season. Thomalin tells his friend how he recently startled from the bushes a “naked swayne” (so Moschus describes Love) and how he shot at him with his arrows till he had emptied his quiver, when he ran away in a fright, and the creature shot at him, and hit him in the heel. Willie explains to his friend that the swain was Love, a fact with which he is acquainted because his father had once caught him in a fowling net, fortunately without his bow and arrows. The eclogue concludes, as usual, with “emblems” chosen by the two speakers. The epigrammatic terseness of Bion, whose idyll is contained in sixteen lines, is lost in Spenser’s diffuse description, which runs to one hundred and seventeen. No less melodious are the lyrical songs which, in the eclogues for April and November, he turns to the purposes of compliment or elegy, and which anticipate the still more exquisite music of the Prothalamion and Epithalamion, the work of his later years.

In The Faerie Queene, Spenser applies the allegorical method of composition on the same principle as in The Shepheards Calender, but, owing to the nature of the theme, with great difference in the character of the results. He had taken up the idea of allegorising romance almost at the same time that he contemplated the pastoral. He was soon called away to more practical work by accepting, in 1580, the position of secretary to lord Grey, who had been appointed lord deputy in Ireland. Public duties and the turbulent state of the country, doubtless, only allowed him intervals of leisure for excursions into the “delightful land of Faerie,” but we know that he continued to develop his design—of which he had completed the first, and a portion of the second, book before leaving England—for the work is mentioned by his friend Lodowick Bryskett as being in progress in 1583. Spenser’s name appears as one of the “undertakers” for the colonisation of Munster, in 1586, when he obtained possession of Kilcolman castle, the scenery in the neighbourhood of which he often mentions in The Faerie Queene. Here, in 1589, he was visited by Ralegh and read to him the three books of the poem which were all that he had then completed. Ralegh, delighted with what he heard, persuaded Spenser to accompany him to England, no doubt holding out to him prospects of preferment at court, whither the two friends proceeded in the winter of 1589. The first portion of The Faerie Queene was published in 1590.

In estimating the artistic value of this poem, we ought to consider not only what the poet himself tells us about the design, but the motives actually in his mind, so far as these discover themselves in the execution of the work. Allegory, no doubt, is its leading feature. The book, says Spenser, is “a continued allegory or darke conceit.” While adopting the form of the romantic epic as the basis of allegory throughout his entire poem, Spenser seems soon to have discovered that he could only travel easily by this path for a short distance. In his first two books, indeed, it was open to him to represent chivalrous action of an allegorical character, which might be readily understood as a probation undergone by the hero, prince Arthur, in the moral virtues of holiness and temperance. The first book shows the militant Christian, in the person of the Red Cross Knight, travelling in company with Una, the lady of his love, personifying wisdom or the highest form of beauty, on an enterprise, of which the end is to free the kingdom of Una’s parents from the ravages of a great dragon, the evil one. The various adventures in which the actors in the story are involved are well conceived, as setting forth the different temptations to which the Christian character is exposed; and this idea is still more forcibly worked out in the second book, which illustrates the exercise of temperance; for, here, the poet can appropriately ally the treatment of this virtue in Greek philosophy with the many allusions to it in the New Testament. In the allegories of the house of Mammon, the house of Alma and the bower of Bliss, the beauty of the imagery is equalled by the propriety with which treasures of learning are employed to bring the moral into due relief. At this point, however, the capacities of the moral design, as announced by the poet, were exhausted.

“To fashion a gentleman or noble person” in the discipline of chastity, the subject of the third book, would have involved an allegory too closely resembling the one already completed; and it is significant that a female knight is now brought upon the scene; while, both in the third and in the fourth book, the moral is scarcely at all enforced by allegory, but almost always by “ensample,” or adventure. Justice, the virtue exemplified in the fifth book, is not, as would be anticipated from the preface, an inward disposition of the knightly soul, but an external condition of things, produced by the course of politics—scarcely allegorised at all—in real countries such as Ireland, France and the Netherlands; on the other hand, the peculiarly knightly virtue of courtesy is, in the sixth book, illustrated, also with very little attempt at allegory, by means of episodes of adventure borrowed, almost directly, from the romantic narrative of the Morte d’ Arthur.

He explains in his letter to Ralegh why his poem is called The Faerie Queene: “ In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land. And yet, in some places els, I doe otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I do expresse in Belphœbe, fashioning her name according to your owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phoebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana.) So in the person of Prince Arthure I sette forth magnificence in particular; which vertue, for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all, therefore in the whole course I mention the deedes of Arthure applyable to that vertue, which I write of in that booke. But of the XII. other vertues I make XII. other knights the patrones, for the more variety of the history: Of which these three bookes contayn three. ”

This ambiguity of meaning is intensified by the mixture of Christian with pagan imagery, and by the blending of classical mythology, both with local antiquarian learning and with the fictions of romance. In the fifth canto of the first book, for example, Duessa, or Papal Falsehood, goes down to hell, under the guidance of Night, to procure aid from Aesculapius for the wounded paynim Sansfoy, or Infidelity; and her mission gives an opening for a description of many of the torments mentioned in Vergil’s “Inferno.” On her return to the upper air, she goes to the “stately pallace of Dame Pryde,” in whose dungeons are confined many of the proud men mentioned in the Old Testament, or in Greek and Roman history. Shortly afterwards, prince Arthur relates to Una his nurture by the supposed historic Merlin; and the latter, in the third book, discloses to Britomart the line of British kings, as recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and prophesies the reign of Elizabeth. Such profusion of material and multiplicity of motive, while it gives to The Faerie Queene an unequalled appearance of richness and splendour, invalidates the profession of Spenser that the poem is “a continued allegory.” The sense of Spenser’s allegory does not lie in its external truth: its value is to be found in its relation to the beauty of his own thought, and in the fidelity with which it reflects the intellectual temper of his time.

To sum up the foregoing sketch of the poetry of Spenser, it will be seen that he differed from the great European poets who preceded or immediately succeeded him, in that he made no attempt to represent in his verse the dominant moving spirit in the world about him. Chaucer and Shakespeare, the one in the fabliau, the other in the romantic drama, held “the mirror up to nature” and showed “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Milton succeeded in telling the Christian story of the loss of Eden in the form of the pagan epic. While Dante, like Spenser, made allegory the basis of his poetical conception, no more vivid picture can be found of contemporary life and manners in Italian cities under the Holy Roman Empire than in The Divine Comedy. But, in the conduct of his story, Spenser never seems to be in direct touch with his times: his personages, knights or shepherds, wear plainly the dress of literary masquerade; and, though the fifth book of The Faerie Queene, published in 1596, deals allegorically with such matters as the revolt of the Netherlands and the recantation of protestantism by Henri IV of France, it contains no allusion to the Spanish armada. The very absence of clear drift and purpose in the allegory of The Faerie Queene made it a faithful mirror of the spirit of the age. Through all the early portion of Elizabeth’s reign, in which the poetical genius of Spenser formed itself, the nation, in its most influential elements, showed the doubt and hesitancy always characteristic of times of transition.

A clergy, halting between catholic tradition and the doctrines of the reformers; a semi-absolute queen, coquetting in her foreign policy between a rival monarch and his revolted subjects; a court, in which the chivalrous manners of the old nobility were neutralised by the Machiavelian statecraft of the new courtiers; a commercial enterprise, always tending to break through the limits of ancient and stable custom: these were the conditions which made it difficult for an English poet, in the middle of the sixteenth century, to form a view, at once clear and comprehensive, of life and action. Spenser himself evidently sympathised strongly with the old order that was passing away. He loved the time-honoured institutions of chivalry, closely allied to catholic ritual; he reverenced its ideals of honour and courtesy, its exalted woman-worship, its compassion for the poor and suffering. But, at the same time, he was strongly impelled by two counter-movements tending to undermine the ancient fabric whose foundations had been laid by Charles the Great: the zeal of the protestant reformer, and the enthusiasm for letters of the European humanist. The poetical problem he had to solve was, how to present the action of these antagonistic forces in an ideal form, with such an appearance of unity as should satisfy the primary requirements of his art. To fuse irreconcilable principles in a directly epic or dramatic mould was impossible; but it was possible to disguise the essential oppositions of things by covering them with the veil of allegory. The unity of his poetical creations lies entirely in the imaginative medium through which he views them. His poetical procedure is closely analogous to that of the first Neo-Platonists in philosophy. Just as these sought to evolve out of the decayed forms of polytheism, by means of Plato’s dialectic, a new religious philosophy, so, in the sphere of poetry, Spenser attempted to create, for the English court and the circles immediately connected with it, from the perishing institution of chivalry, an ideal of knightly conduct. Glimpses of real objects give an air of actuality to his conception; his allegory, as he himself declares in his preface to The Faerie Queene, has reference to “the most excellent and glorious person of our Soveraine the Queen.” The diction and the versification of Spenser correspond felicitously with the ideal character of his thought. As in the later case of Paradise Lost, what has been justly called the “out-of-the-world” nature of the subject required, in The Faerie Queene, a peculiar vehicle of expression. Though it be true that, in affecting the obsolete, Spenser “writ no language”; though, that is to say, he did not attempt to amplify and polish the living language of the court, yet his mixture of Old English words with classical syntax, in metres adapted from those used by Chaucer, produces a remarkably beautiful effect. Native oppositions of style disappear in the harmonising art of the poet. Though ill-qualified to be the vehicle of epical narrative, the Spenserian stanza has firmly established itself in the language, as a metre of admirable capacity for any kind of descriptive or reflective poetry; and it is a striking illustration of what has been said in the foregoing pages that it has been the instrument generally chosen by poets whose genius has approached nearest to the art of the painter, or who have sought to put forward ideas opposed to the existing condition of things. It is employed by Thomson in The Castle of Indolence, by Keats in The Eve of St. Agnes, by Shelley in The Revolt of Islam and by Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. To have been the poetical ancestor of the poetry of these illustrious writers shows how deeply the art of Spenser is rooted in the imaginative genius of his country, and he needs no better monument than the stanza in his own Ruines of Time:

For deeds doe die, however noblie donne, And thoughts of men do as themselves decay; But wise wordes, taught in numbers for to runne, Recorded by the Muses, live for ay; Ne may with storming showers be washt away, Ne bitter-breathing windes with harmfull blast, Nor age, nor envie, shall them ever wast.

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