Hello, everyone!  Thanks for tuning in to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason.  Today is the first of two episodes on the Elizabethan poet and factotum Edmund Spenser.  This first will focus on his works of lyric poetry and the second will take as its subject his sprawling epic poem The Faerie Queen.  And I do mean sprawling, ladies and gentlemen – it stretches, spreads, rambles, extends, straddles, lounges, and indeed, from time to time, lolls.  But more on that next time.

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On the last full episode of the show, we looked at Sir Philip Sidney, particularly in light of what Castiglione called “sprezzatura” – the ability to make the difficult and complex seem casual or blase.  To be awesome without looking like you’re trying to be awesome.

Today’s writer, however, tried very hard.  He intentionally set out to be a great, transformative poet and didn’t give a fly’s fart in a fountain about looking cool.  Where Sidney appeared insouciant, Edmund Spenser strove.  

Much of the early modern poetry we’ve looked at thus far has been the pastime of courtiers – a fairly slim sample of the population when you come to think of it.  Of course, court aristos are the only ones with the formal education and free time to give to the frivolity of verse.  The lower and middling sorts were too busy trying to get food and not get the plague.

Spenser was of that lower and middling sort.  Middle-class fella, born around 1552, got a good education by enrolling as a “sizar” at Cambridge – that is, an “impoverished scholar.”  A poor kid.  While there, however, he took a great interest in poetic theory and versification.  On the less savory side, his first poems were virulently anti-Catholic.  Eventually, he landed a gig as the secretary to the Earl of Leicester (yes, Queen Bess’s alleged boyfriend!), though he never found enough favor with her majesty to join the court.  He later went to Ireland where he became a minor official in the colonial apparatus, continued to heap scorn and opprobrium on the Catholics, and lost his infant son during an anti-colonial uprising in Munster.  Probably did nothing to improve his attitude toward the native people.  

Spenser’s first major work is a collection of pastoral poems called The Shepherd’s Calendar.  We’ve spoken of pastoral poetry a few times here on the poddy, but for those just tuning in, pastoral poetry depicts an idealized rural landscape and lifestyle.  Pastorals go all the way back the Greek Theocritus of the 3rd century BCE, and became a standard genre in the classical period.  Shepherds feature prominently (the term comes from the Latin for "shepherd")  – well, it is the actual world’s oldest profession, isn’t it?  Herding.  I imagine the solitude of such a vocation was a great impetus to that other oldest profession, much to the relief of the sheep.

At any rate, early modern pastorals exhibit a nostalgia for a simple country life, in reaction to the increasing urbanization of 16th century societies.  Common concerns of pastoral poetry include love (well, seduction mainly); the value of poetry; mourning and death; the corrupt city and court over against the "purity" of the country.  Frequently, poets satirized politics through the voices of the shepherds who poked fun at easily recognizable prominent persons.

Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar is important for a number of reasons.  Firstly, there was a somewhat implicit understanding that, based on the Virgilian model, if one intended to be a serious poet, one must submit to something of a public apprenticeship.  Pastoral poetry was the formal declaration of that intention.  You produced some pastorals, worked your way up the ladder through say, tragedy, and finally you produced your epic.  So, by whipping the Shepherds Calendar out in 1579, Spenser makes his ambitions known.  He will be a new, great poet.

And I want to call attention to the “new.”  We’ll see that Spenser is quite a paradoxical writer in many ways – innovative and traditional, continental and nativist.  For instance – and this is probably among the things most commented on concerning Spenser – he uses a consciously archaic form of English.  He emulates what he understands as medieval language, eschewing as often as he can diction with classical roots in favor of a quote-unquote native word.  He frequently uses the “eke” for also or “mickle” for much or great.  Quite apart from ornamentation, Spenser does so in a conscious effort to establish English’s bona fides, as it were.  16th century England is a country on the rise: it has established its religious independence from Rome, has made some gains in colonial expansion, and has thwarted a Spanish invasion.  Such a waxing power requires a language equal to the great cultural languages, and Spenser saw that lying in the language of Chaucer, “the lodestar of our language.”  In fact, Spenser begins The Shepherd’s Calender with a kind of envoy whose first line: “Go little book, thy self present / As child whose parent is unkent” echoes Chaucer’s introduction to his Troilus and Criseyde: “Go little book, go little mine tragedy.”  And the word “unkent” in Spenser here means unknown, a form of the Anglo-Saxon verb “to ken” which means to understand.

So even in looking back, Spenser looks forward.  The Shepherds Calendar is quite deftly structured – there’s a plan here.  Right, so it contains twelve poems – one for each month of the year – a calendar, so while each poem can stand on its own, they all collectively form an organic whole – the turning of the seasons and the year.  Interesting bit of structural trivia: Spenser begins the Shepherds Calendar in January and ends it in December.  He does this because he wants the poem to begin and end in winter, with all its connotations.  Big deal, you say, that’s how calendars work.  Ah, but here’s the thing – back in the day, the year was taken to begin in March, round about spring, so Spenser’s making a symbolic move here.

Each poem is written in a different meter and of those, only 3 or 4 were in common use at the time, so Spenser invents most of the scansion here.  Each pastoral is introduced with a gloss by an “EK,” which summarizes the poem to follow.  Now, who is EK?  I’m not sure I want to open that can of worms – the tin-foil hat people have so many theories and are easily excited.  (whisper) Some say that EK is Edmund Kirke, a fellow sizar at Cambridge.  Others posit Gabriel Harvey, a college buddy who is mentioned in the dedicatory epistle.  Still others say it’s Spenser himself – a notion I find attractive because some of the glosses are wrong – off the mark.  Interesting to think that Spenser’s got a little mind-screw layer going on in the poem, too.

Spenser himself appears in the poems in an allegorized figure he calls Colin Clout, one of the shepherds – a lover and a poet (you may wish to know that Colin Clout is a folk character originally created by John Skelton).  Spenser says, “Under which name this poet secretly shadoweth himself, as sometime did Virgil under the name Tityrus.”  Hardly a secret when you tell us straight away, but . . . In the poem that begins the cycle, called “January” and written in six-line pentameter stanzas rhyming ABABCC, Colin laments his unrequited love for the indifferent Rosalind, her coldness fitting for the bitter winter.   He breaks his “oaten pipe” – that is, the metaphor for his poetry – and collapses in despair.

The poem “April” records the dialogue of two shepherds – Hobbinoll and Thenott – who discuss Colin’s recent dearth of poetry: Hobbinoll laments: 

Shepherds delights he dooth them all forswear,

Hys pleasant Pipe, whych made us merriment,

He willfully hath broke, and doth forbeare

His wonted songs, wherein he all outwent.

Thenott then convinces Hobbinoll to sing one of Colin’s songs, and Hobbinoll obliges with a lay in praise of Queen Elizabeth, “fair Eliza, Queen of Shepherds all.”  The dialogue Spenser writes in iambic pentameter, but for the lay he switches to a complex stanza form: 9 lines, the first four alternate iambic pentameter and dimeter, then two pentameter lines, two dimeter lines, and finally a tetrameter.  The rhyme scheme is ABABCCDDC.  The effect is very dancelike, the short lines feel like staccato steps clipping the languid long lines.

Let’s look at “October,” which many critics think is the most important entry in the calendar.  Two shepherds, Cuddie and Piers, discuss the value of poetry.  Piers tries to encourage his dejected friend, who used to be quite prolific and who cheered everyone with his poems.  Cuddie says that’s all past – there’s no point in writing poetry now.

I think it’s easy to see this dialogue as, in some way, Spenser’s debate with himself about the value of a poetic career.  Piers seems very lofty, believes that poetry can “restrain the lust of lawless youth with good advice” – that is, as Sidney had argued – poetry is the grace of virtuous instruction.  Piers believes in divine inspiration – “thy Muse display her fluttering wing” – and urges his friend to abandon the pastoral ditties and aspire to heroic verse: 

Abandon then the base and viler clown,

Lyft up thy selfe out of the lowly dust:

And sing of bloody Mars, of wars, of jousts.

Turn thee to those, that weld the awful crowne,

To doubted Knights, whose woundlesse armour rusts,

And helmes unbruzed wexen dayly browne.

Perhaps, suggests Piers, Cuddie could take Queen Elizabeth herself, or her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, as his subjects: 

Whither thou list in fayre Elisa rest,

Or if thee please in bigger notes to sing,

Advaunce the worthy whome shee loveth best,

That first the white beare to the stake did bring.

But Cuddie is more practical, more down to earth (despite the fact that EK calls him “the perfect pattern of a poet.  It certainly feels as though Piers is more the pattern, especially given his advice about the proper hierarchy of poetry, the appropriate subjects and ways of securing patronage).  Cuddie notes that he is no better off for his poetic work.  Poetry is too transitory, he gains nothing by it:

The dapper ditties, that I wont devise,

To feede youthes fancie, and the flocking fry,

Delighten much: what I the bett for thy?

They han the pleasure, I a sclender prise.

I beate the bush, the byrds to them doe flye:

What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?

All his effort flies to others – he works, they enjoy.  Furthermore, Cuddie argues that there are no virtuous heroes nowadays and no wealthy patrons willing to pay to hear about them: “But after vertue gan for age to stoupe, / And mighty manhode brought a bedde of ease.”  All a poet can do in these decadent times is satirize the present folly.  Then, he snipes, “For Colin fittes such famous flight to scanne: / He, were he not with love so ill bedight, / Would mount as high, and sing as soote as Swanne.”  Oh, if only our friend Colin Clout weren’t so addle-pated in love, he might be able to write some truly righteous verse.

OK, if we accept my little notion that “October” is Spenser’s debating with himself about the purpose of the poet’s craft, things just got crowded.  Remember, Colin is, in the dramatic structure of the Shepherd’s Calendar, Spenser himself, so the author seems to be chastising himself for not getting on with it.  That line feels to me like Spenser dismissing the whole point of the October poem – Piers encourages, Cuddie whines, Colin daydreams – and, oh, if we want to think of EK, the glosser, as another Spenser avatar, he doesn’t even get his own arguments straight.  

This is not the typical reading of this poem, but I think such a meta angle is kind of fun.  Besides, all the stuff here offers a really good anticipation of Spenser’s actual career.  He starts with the pastorals, he’ll move on to some love poems (we’ll get to these in a second), then writes his great heroic epic, The Faerie Queen, about Good Queen Bess herself.  Just like Piers said.

So young Edmund moves on to his love poems, the most famous of which belong to his cycle of 89 sonnets called Amoretti, which means “little loves” or “little intimacies.”  Like Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Amoretti sounds delicious – like you stop into a panetteria, order a cappuccino and two amoretti.  I imagine some kind of light pastry with buttered almonds and cream.  Mmmmm.

Anyway, in the early 1590s, a middle-aged Spenser fell to swooning and a-wooing for young Elizabeth Boyle and in 1594, their connubial bliss was consummated.  Amoretti is a record of their courtship and marriage.  And here, too, Spenser does a bit of subtle innovating.  While there is no shortage of Renaissance sonnet cycles – and we’ve mentioned a couple already and there will be more – Amoretti is unusual in that the courtship is successful and the love is fulfilled.  We don’t get that in the old medieval courtly love verses and Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella gives away the broken hearts in the very title.  But Spenser gets his Beatrice, his Laura, his Stella.  Bravo!  There also seems to be a much closer relationship between poet and speaker in Amoretti – we get the almost proto-Romanticist sense that Spenser actually is the speaker of these poems and not merely a meta-fictional projection as in Sidney or Petrarch.

None of this is to say that there is no drama or tension in the Amoretti sonnets – it is, after a fashion, a narrative and narrative requires conflict.  So, the cycle begins with Spenser’s love being rejected by Elizabeth, but in the fullness of time she relents and returns his love.  Hooray!  Ah, but summat gang agley and she once again turns against him.  Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, girl gets angry at boy. . . how will it all turn out?

Patience, dear listener, patience.  Well, it will turn out well.

Sonnet 1 giddily anticipates the joy of the pages, lines, and rhymes when the poet’s beloved reads them.  But by sonnet 10, he is cursing the “Unrighteous Lord of Love” for tormenting him, allowing her to make “my pain her sport.”  In sonnet 22, during the season of Lent – a time of repentance – he decides he will build his beloved (metaphorically) “an altar to appease her ire” on which “my heart will sacrifice.”  Sonnet 28 raises his expectations: “give me great hope of your relenting mind,” but 29 confesses that she has misunderstood him, treating his “simple meaning with disdainful scorn.”  The ups and downs continue, but in the final sonnet, number 89, the credits roll rather bleakly.  The final couplet reads: “Dark is my day, whiles her fair light I miss / And dead my life that wants such lively bliss.”

Whoa, Old Man, you said it worked out well!  This doesn’t seem like a rom-com ending.  Indeed no, it doesn’t.  And perhaps I overstated when I implied a happy ending.  Yes, they do get together and wed and . . . well, you know.  But underneath all the Amoretti is this ticking timebomb – it haunts several of the sonnets and gives them not only their drama, but their ambiguity.  It is mortality.  The fact of death.

Sonnet 13 offers an early example.  The beloved , 

. . .  looking on the earth whence she was borne:

Her minde remembreth her mortalitie,

What so is fayrest shall to earth returne.

But that same lofty countenance seemes to scorne

Base thing, and thinke how she to heaven may clime.

There is a haughty defiance in her, but Spenser thinks he can exploit it to win her, for “Yet lowly still vouchsafe to looke on me, / Such lowlinesse shall make you lofty be.”  In other words, though I am lowly and base, yet I have a means by which to grant you the immortality you deserve – and that is my verse.  

Sonnet 72 also offers the contrast between the “burden of mortality” and “sovereign beauty.”  And again, Spenser believes he can resolve that contrast.  His mind

Ne thinks of other heaven, but how it might

Her harts desire with most contentment please.

Hart need not wish none other happinesse,

But here on earth to have such hevens blisse.

Note that “heaven” is somewhat desacralized here – it’s not a theological metaphor or proposition.  It’s very earthly, palpable, sensual.  My favorite sonnet in Amoretti is probably the most famous one, but it does a lovely job of punching the bruise – that is, it’s a great way of making my point yet again.  I’ll quote it in its entirety:

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 things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your vertues 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."

Oh, I just love that!  OK, look, here’s the story: Edmund and his lady love, Elizabeth, are walking along the beach and, in what seems an innocently romantic gesture, he writes her name in the sand.  But a wave washes it away.  So he does it again, and the same thing happens.  The perspicacious among you might ask, “Why doesn't he just walk farther up the beach?”  Because then he wouldn’t be able to make his cool point.  She says, “Dummy, you can’t make me immortal.  I’m going to get washed away someday just like my name here.”  She makes a lovely pun on the word “vain,” exploiting both its meaning of conceited or narcissistic and its meaning of futile.  

But in the sonnet’s volta, he says, “Nuh-uh!”  Let low, base creatures die in dust, my poetry will write your name in the heavens!  And even when all life on earth is extinguished, our love will live in these lines and will bring life back!  But note that he says “heaven” again not as a celestial realm but as the sky – we’re on earth.  And base things can “die in dust” he says.  There is no “heaven” in the afterlife sense – we return to the dust of the earth, just as in Genesis and as in Sonnet 13.  Immortality here is conferred by the humanistic effort of art – this poem posits humanity as the imago dei – the image of God – a creator with a small “c.”  Well, vain man indeed!

Now, it’s easy for the casual reader to note the sniping of Elizabeth the beloved in many of these poems and come away with the idea that she’s a bit of a shrew – why on earth is Spenser pursuing such a grouchy woman?  I think to do so, though, is rather unfair.  She often provides a pragmatic corrective to his wilder fancies.  Perhaps she’s cautious, perhaps conservative, wary of daring to dream the florid dreams of her wooer.  But she’s not cruel, and when Spenser does refer to her more bristly moods, one gets the sense that he is aware that his own desperation for her shades his interpretation of her behavior.  And let’s remember that “Amoretti” means “little intimacies” – we should think of these sonnets as very private moments between two people who are fully open to each other, who know how to situate whatever extralingual cues might be implied in the verse.  Don’t believe me?  Just go back to Sonnet 75 or look at 79 and read them imagining a teasing, playful tone.  It totally works.  In fact, I think it makes those poems more intriguing.  Perhaps at the remove of 400+ years, we too easily find the old language automatically formal and grave.  Easy to forget that people had a laugh even back then.

And if we read them that way – a bit playful, a bit teasing – then we easily understand the happy ending that Spenser gives us in a poem called “Epithalamion.”  That word comes from the Greek and means something like “at the bedroom door” and it indicates a wedding poem.  Told you it all worked out.  Classical epithalamions do have a somewhat formal structure: they begin with an invocation of the Muse, move on to describe the bridal procession.  Then we get the religious rites followed by the wedding party.  Finally, the poem concludes with the preparations for the wedding night and (tastefully implied) consummation.

Again, Spenser takes a traditional form and innovates.  Here, he is both poet and bridegroom, not merely a guest-observer.  The poem contains 365 long lines (as well as shorter ones), one for each day of the year, and 24 stanzas, one for each hour of the day – specifically 16 daylight stanzas and 8 nighttime.  He also employs a refrain – some variation of the first stanza’s concluding line: “The woods shall to me answer and my echo ring” ends each of the remaining stanzas, subtly modulating the meaning each time.  

Yet, despite the happy celebrations, the wonderful descriptions of her beauty, still we sense Spenser’s anxiety about the passing of time.  On the one hand, the groom has the quite understandable yearning for night to come: 

Ah when will this long weary day have end,

And lende me leave to come unto my love?

How slowly do the houres theyr numbers spend?

How slowly does sad Time his feathers move?

But on the other hand, the poem ends with a prayer to the gods:

Poure out your blessing on us plentiously,

And happy influence upon us raine,

That we may raise a large posterity,

Which from the earth, which they may long possesse,

With lasting happinesse.

You needn’t pray for posterity and lasting happiness unless you anxiously recognize its temporality, its finiteness.  We all know this, right?  The week goes by so slowly, the weekend so quickly.  We anticipate and we dread.  We even have it in the traditional wedding vows: till death us do part.  Wow, right at the beginning of the most deeply intimate relationship humans can have, we are reminded that we will die.

That’s what happens, though, when, like Spenser, you seek to imbue your poetry with some flesh and blood actuality.  Beatrice and Laura and Stella are, in the final analysis, abstractions – projections of Dante’s and Petrarch’s and Sidney’s aspirations and desires.  Even Wyatt’s Anne Boleyn (if we can be so liberal) eventually becomes a prism through which he studies himself.  But Spenser blurs the boundary between self and speaker and gives his Elizabeth a recognizable, round, and complex character, a humanity not abstracted.  

And so, I think we can see Edmund Spenser as a synthetic poet, and by that I do not mean artificial, I mean blending, combining, synthesizing.  He looks back to Chaucer for a traditional “pure” language, he imitates Theocritus and Virgil, but he imbues those medieval and classical traditions with a modern, humanistic sensibility.  

We’ll talk more about this in our next episode on Spenser, in which we will look at his masterpiece: the epic Faerie Queen.  If you like to read along, let me suggest that you focus on Book 1 of the poem – the story of Redcross the Knight – and maybe have a look at what are called The Mutability Cantos.  Given the massiveness of the work, I’m probably going to focus on these two sections, ok?

Thanks for listening.  Talk to you soon.

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