The Columbia History of British Poetry (51 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 215
The heroic mastery displayed, in various modalities, by Spenser's knights also underlies his culture's idea of the epic poet. The idea of imitating prestigious examplesas the Busyrane tapestries imitate the bravura performances in Ovid's
Metamorphoses
involved the spirit of emulation, as if the writer were engaged in a rivalry or trial of strength with his models. We should follow the ancients, Ben Jonson said, "but as guides, not commanders." In a public exchange of letters (published in 1580), Spenser's mentor, Gabriel Harvey, spoke of the young poet's
Faerie Queene
project as an attempt to "emulate" and ''overgo" Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso
.
When addressing the queen, the poet of
The Faerie Queene
represents himself as a humble suitor or dazzled admirer (as in the proems to Books I, III, and VI), but he is bolder when speaking of the poem itself. In the proem to Book II he rejects the accusation that Fairyland is an idle fancy by asking, rhetorically, who had heard of Peru or the Amazon or fruitfullest Virginia" before the discoveries that resulted from the "hardy enterprize" of his age. In the proem to Book IV he defends his poem against the charge of wantonness by claiming, in words that align his own kind of endeavor with the adventures he depicts,
     that all the workes of those wise sages,
And braue exploits which great Heroes wonne,
In loue were either ended or begunne:
Witnesse the father of Philosophie [Socrates], . . . etc.
                                                               (IV.Proem.3)
These lines suggest one aspect of the poetic mastery implicit in
The Faerie Queene
, a claim to fundamental wisdom, both moral and "philosophical" (in the broad Renaissance sense, which included natural knowledge). This claim is explicit and intensive in a canto like that devoted to the Garden of Adonis (III.vi), where the poet represents the fundamental unions of form and matter in the natural universe and of body and soul in humans conceived as natural creatures. But the claim is also implicit in the encyclopedic range of
The Faerie Queene
and the ability of its poet to summon the wisdom of the ages and represent any aspect of human life.
In addition to exemplifying the idea that the poet, in Sidney's words, is "the monarch of all sciences,"
The Faerie Queene
demonstrates the poet's technical mastery. This is most evident in the poem's distinctive style, interlaced with both "antique" words and neologisms, and in the
 
Page 216
nine-line stanza that Spenser devised for his epictwo pentameter quatrains, linked by a common rhyme, with a final hexameter ("alexandrine")which has ever since been known to English poets as the Spenserian stanza.
Technical prowess had been conspicuous in Spenser's poetry from the beginning of his career. In the letters exchanged with Gabriel Harvey, he said, "a God's sake, may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?" This was said of a failed experiment (in which Sidney and other Elizabethans took part), to write English verse in the quantitative meters of Greek and Latin poetry, but the sense of having power over one's language underlies the immense expansion of the resources of English poetryin verse forms, in metrical flexibility, in dictionthat Spenser and his contemporaries achieved. Spenser's first major poem,
The Shepheardes Calender
, was among other things a technical showpiece. Its verse forms range from elaborate stanzas derived from continental models to the standard six-line (
a b a b c c
) stanza of earlier Tudor verse to balladlike meters suggestive of rustic naïveté and energy. There is a similar range in its diction (one aspect of which, the use of "auncient" English words, gets special attention in the prefatory epistle of E. K., the poem's unidentified editor), which is by turns adapted to the various purposes indicated by E. K. in categorizing the eclogues as "moral" (which includes some "satirical bitterness"), ''plaintive," and "recreative."
Poetic fictions, Sidney says, are "but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been." To some extent, the preceding account has shared this idealizing bias by suggesting that the poetic heroes and the heroic poet of
The Faerie Queene
are adequate to engaging the forces they confront in themselves and in their world. This may indeed be the idea of the poem. But to many readers and critics,
The Faerie Queene
reveals a vulnerability to or complicity with the troubling realities it claims to master. The most notorious example, the Bower of Bliss canto (II.xii), is perhaps the most admired, imitated, influential, and controversial canto in the poem. From Milton's citing it (in
Areopagitica
) to show that Spenser was "a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas," to Hazlitt's praise of its "voluptuous pathos and languid brilliancy of fancy," to Yeats's seeing a Spenser who is "a poet of the delighted senses," to C. S. Lewis's argument that the Bower's corrupt pleasures reveal "the exquisite health" of Spenser's own imagination, this canto has been a touchstone both of Spenser's poetry and its interpreters' poetics. But
 
Page 217
at the same time as it has been admired, it has also been viewed as deeply in conflict with itself. Its main actionGuyon's mission to destroy Acrasia's earthly paradiseis clearly intended to exemplify heroic temperance, both as self-control in the face of alluring pleasures and as a capacity for purposeful action. But the pleasures represented often seem more persuasive than the knight's resistance to them, and his concluding action, the destruction of the Bower (II.xii.83), is disturbingly violent, as if it were less a spiritual triumph than an act of vengeance, fueled by a deep ambivalence.
This is not the place to attempt to settle the question of the Bower of Bliss. The important point is that if Spenser's knights are heroes of epicthat is, if they are human in their strengths and achievements, not magically endowed in their natures or their accoutrementsthen the forces they oppose are inherently part of their natures and situations, and a deep engagement with them, which is precisely that
The Faerie Queene
is to be praised for, can undo them or the poem that represents them.
Some such undoing seems to have been the fate of
The Faerie Queene
itself. There is a difference of views about the poem as a whole analogous to those about the Bower of Bliss. For some interpreters, the six completed books plus the "Mutability Cantos" are a unified whole
The Faerie Queene
as it was meant to beeven though Spenser earlier projected a longer poem. For others, Spenser's projectfully to represent his world and the principles of action in itcomes apart in Books V and VI. The presumptive causes are Spenser's dilemmas (both conscious and unconscious) as an agent of English colonialism in Ireland and his resentment at failing to achieve favor at court.
The internal signs of the poem's disintegration are, first, the split between public and private, of which the climax is the withdrawal of Sir Calidore, the knight of Courtesy, to a pastoral world, where he and the poet question the value of courtly life and knightly endeavor; second, the poet's self-representations, both in his expressions of bitterness as an Elizabethan subject (implicit in his treatment of the Irish situation in Book V, explicit at the end of Book VI) and in his appearances in the role of poet. The first stanza of Book VI begins, "The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde, / In this delightfull land of Faery," and develops the contrast between the "sweet variety" of Fairyland and the poet's own ''tedious trauell" (= both travel and travail) and "dulled spright." While this does not renounce his imaginative realm, it is far
 
Page 218
from representing his enterprise, as he did in the Proem to Book II, as like the voyages of discovery. In the pastoral cantos (ix and x) Sir Calidore climbs Mount Acidale, a semidivine rural precinct, and sees the three Graces dancing around a piping shepherd, who is identified as Colin Clout. "Who knows not Colin Clout?" the poet asks (x.16), aware that all his readers would recognize this as his own pastoral pseudonym in
The Shepheardes Calender
and in
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe
a long poem written a year after the first installment of
The Faerie Queene
, in which criticism of the English court is balanced by an attempt to establish a domain of poetry and ideal love on the poet's home ground.
From Theocritus and Virgil, the founders of pastoral, poets have represented themselves as shepherds in order to acknowledge their limited powers in the real world and at the same time to claim a compensating authority in their powers of song. This doubleness is evident throughout
The Shepheardes Calender
, where the claim to be the "new poet," as E. K. calls him, capable of renewing English poetry, is held in check by a sense both of personal unfitness and of living in an unworthy age. Colin Clout's reappearance in
The Faerie Queene
has a similar double valency. On the one hand, his discourse on the Graces and his praise of his ideal beloved is one of the great set pieces of the poem, fulfilling for the last time its project of representing human virtue as a participation in the order of things. On the other hand, unlike the poem's other "allegorical cores," it is not a narration or the representation of a spiritual realm, but the speech of a single characterone who, more-over, is bound to the spot he inhabits as the condition of his vision and his song. There is thus an authorial self-division, at the end of Book VI, between Spenser's pastoral persona and the narrator who conducts Sir Calidore to the rather unsatisfactory conclusion of his adventures. If this indicates a certain loss of coherence in
The Faerie Queene
, it also helps us understand an important development in Spenser's writing in the last decade of his life.
After the publication of Books IIII of
The Faerie Queene
in 1590, Spenser wrote and published not only the last three books of the poem, but the most interesting and enduring of his so-called minor poems:
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe
(published in 1595),
Amoretti
(a sonnet sequence)
and Epithalamion
(a celebration of his own marriage; 1595),
Fowre Hymnes
(of Love, Beauty, Heavenly Love, and Heavenly Beauty; 1596), and
Prothalamion
(a "spousal verse" in honor of two aristo-
 
Page 219
cratic marriages; 1596). With the partial exception of
Colin Clout
, these poems are in genres in which Spenser had not written before. What is common to all of them is that they are large lyric forms
Epithalamion
and
Prothalamion
, which adapt the long stanza of the Petrarchan canzone, are particularly remarkable formal accomplishmentsand that, as opposed to the "minor poems" of the 1580s, collected and published as
Complaints
in 1591, they imitate and derive from the love poetry of the European Renaissance. Taken as a group, these poems represent an alternative body of major poetry to Spenser's epic. In a sense, however, they continue the project of
The Faerie Queene
. They contain muchmythological representations, issues of political and courtly service, love as both human experience and cosmic forcethat could have found a place in
The Faerie Queene
. Formally, they are what we might call "public lyrics." The poet speaks in the first person, but on public occasions (the aristocratic double wedding celebrated in
Prothalamion
) or about public situations (the critique of the court in
Colin Clout
) or about love impersonally conceived as a cosmic reality (
Fowre Hymnes
and the end of
Colin Clout
). Even the epithalamion on the poet's own marriage, far from being merely private or personal, stages the event in nature, in country, town and church, and in the cosmos itself, and brings to bear on it a seemingly array of mythological personages.
These poems, in other words, can be seen as continuing the vein of Colin Clout's discourse on the Graces in Book VI. These late lyrics individually develop single aspects of
The Faerie Queene
and represent the poet's way of sustaining his commitment to the idea of heroic poetry in the face of the (apparent) untenability of his epic itself. If
The Faerie Queene
is threatened with disintegration in its later books, each of these public lyrics can be regarded as what the poem's final installment, the "Two Cantos of Mutabilitie," explicitly isa coherent fragment of the original epic project.
The relation of Spenser's major lyrics to his epic indicates how Sidney's and Jonson's poems are related to their idea of poetry. In Sidney's case, this relationship is explicit in one of his two major bodies of poetry, the four series of "Eclogues" that separate the five books of
Arcadia
. In the prose romance itself, with its moral, political, and emotional entanglements, poetry is confined to brief lyric forms, predominantly expressing the isolation of desire and the dilemmas of love. The eclogues, by explicitly stepping back from the action, provide an opportunity for sus-

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