Edmund SpenserRezensionen

Ths is all the Spencer we have. It contains the Faerie Queen, several sonnet sequences and a bit of prose mostly relating to the earthquake of 1579. Spencer, being consciously arty, uses the very open spelling of the Chaucerian period. There is a biographical and bibliographical essay at the beginning of the book. This collection certainly made me more appreciative of Shakespeare.

Composed as an overt moral and political allegory, The Faerie Queene, with its dramatic episodes of chivalry, pageantry and courtly love, is also a supreme work of atmosphere, colour and sensuous description.

One of my favorite books ever. I love how Spenser crafted his own language.

It's difficult for me to discuss this one ... Spenser was actually the first poet I "liked" after spending much of my childhood thinking poetry -- which I now aspire to write, myself -- was "dumb." Well, okay, a lot of poetry IS dumb, but then so much % of anything is bullshit (I'm murdering "Sturgeon's Law" there). I didn't read The Faerie Queene, which I *think* is still, in its half-completed state, the longest poem in the English language, until much later, but hoo-ee, is it ever something. Spenser seems to have been a bit of a shit human being (if I am not mistaken his rep in Ireland is still, uh, problematic) but what a poet. I forget who said it ... it might've been C.S. Lewis or maybe it was A. C. Baugh in his history of English Literature (which I read around the same time as The Faerie Queene) ... but next to the golden landslide of Spenser even Shakespeare comes to look a bit like tinsel. I look forward to one day going through it all again ... hope I live long enough.

The Genius of Spenser transforms an Elizabethan love sonnet sequence into something delicate and personal with poems that are sometimes striking in their beauty. Despite Spenser's use of some antiquated words they prove to be relatively easy to read and this is because of Spenser's ear for melody and his skill in making the poems flow. For the most part they follow a logical development and end in a rhyming couplet that brings the poem to a natural end. Spenser developed his own rhyming scheme for his 14 lined sonnets which knits the poems together. In many ways they are more traditional than Shakespeare's sonnets and are less complex and for the most part avoid some of the knotty language that Shakespeare preferred.

Elizabethan love sonnet collections can be dreary things indeed, as by the 1590's they had quickly fallen into a pattern that owed far more to a style of writing than to any emotional content. They were seemingly based on ideas of courtly love, wedded to the example and template set down by the Italian poet Petrarch. They usually take the form of poems addressed to a woman with a fictitious name who is the love of the poets life; usually an unrequited love, hence the standard phrases and images of the love lorn speaker pleading his case to be accepted as a lover. Spenser, while drawing on the Petrarchan form using themes and imagery that would be familiar to readers, subtly changed the raison d'être of his collection.

Firstly he addressed his poems to Elizabeth: Elizabeth Boyle who became his wife in 1594 the year before the poems were published and so they became a tribute to her. This is not a sequence of poems where the love remains unrequited: about three quarters through the collection, there is a change of mood and in sonnet 64 they kiss and it is evident that Elizabeth has given her consent. The poems are sequenced so that the reader can follow the outcome of the poets courtship, this was not the case in other collections: usually the lady was already married or remained an etherial figure and the poets painful love affair continued in keeping them apart. Spenser's Amoretti can be seen as a denigration of the courtly love ideal that was a feature of previous collections, because although his courtship went through the usual pains of thankless striving for acceptance, it ended with a commitment to marriage and then a celebration of his success.

The traditional imagery used by Petrarch and his followers is used by Spenser, however he takes these images and exaggerates them to such an extent that they become almost a parody. This is particularly noticeable in the power of his lovers eyes: the withering looks that the lady gives her suitor alternates with her celestial gaze that has the power to attract everyone and everything:

Sonnet 36
Is there no meanes for me to purchace peace,
Or make agreement with her thrilling eyes;
But that their cruelty doth still increace,
And dayly more augment my miseryes?

Sonnet 16
One day as I unwarily did gaze
On those fayre eyes, my loves immortall light,
The whiles my stonisht hart stood in amaze,
Through sweet illusion of her lookes delight,
I mote perceive how, in her glauncing sight,
Legions of Loves with little wings did fly,
Darting their deadly arrows, fyry bright,
At every rash beholder passing by,

The exaggeration used becomes almost comic. We have no idea how his contemporary Elizabethan readers would have interpreted the sonnets, but reading them today the poet seems to be laughing at himself as well as his intended:

Sonnet 54
Yet she, beholding me with constant eye,
Delights not in my merth, nor rues my smart:
But when I laugh, she mocks; and when I cry,
She laughs, and hardens evermore her hart.
What then can move her? If nor merth, nor mone,
She is no woman, but a sencelesse stone.

Spenser certainly praises the beauty of his beloved in typical male gaze fashion, but he emphasises that it is her wit and mind that he values above all else and that will make for a lasting happy relationship:

Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it,
For that your selfe ye daily such doe see:
But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit
And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me.
For all the rest, how ever fayre it be,
Shall turne to nought and lose that glorious hew;

Elizabethan sonneteers tended to link the idea of an unrequited love to somehow making them better men because of the pain that they suffer. They in typical courtier fashion learn go the extra mile in all the things that they do to impress their beloved. Spenser was not a typical courtier although of course he relied on his reputation as a poet and a gentleman to secure positions in government. He found himself almost in exile in Ireland, unable to secure a position at court. His courtship of Elizabeth was in keeping with traditional protestant virtues and therefore successful in leading to matrimony and much has been made of the links between the sonnets and the religious calendar.

There are 89 sonnets in this collection and sonnet 64 acts like a turn in the whole collection because at this point the relationship changes; It starts with "Coming to kiss her lyps, (such grace I found)'', there had been no evidence of physical contact before this point. Now it is the poet who is in control of the situation and his beloved accepts her situation, but not without fears of losing her liberty sonnet 65 addresses this beautifully:

The doubt which ye misdeeme, fayre Love, is vaine,
That fondly feare to lose your liberty,
When, losing one, two liberties ye gayne,
And make him bond that bondage earst did fly.
Sweet be the bands the which true love doth tye,
Without constraynt or dread of any ill:
The gentle birde feeles no captivity
Within her cage, but sings, and feeds her fill.

The poems now are a celebration and a triumph and include the sonnets that appear most in various anthologies, however the last four sonnets end the collection on a downbeat note. Sonnet 86 is an angry poem addressed to a slanderous accusation and the last three sonnets deal with a temporary separation and the pain it brings to both of them. I found great pleasure in reading these poems and because of their musicality and their accessibility I rank them together with Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney's collections and a 5 star read. Difficult to choose one of the sonnets to close this appreciation, but I do like sonnet 71:

I ioy to see how, in your drawen work,
Your selfe unto the Bee ye doe compare,
And me unto the Spyder, that doth lurke
In close awayt, to catch her unaware.
Right so your selfe were caught in cunning snare
Of a deare foe, and thralled to his love;
In whose streight bands ye now captived are
So firmely, that ye never may remove.
But as your worke is woven all about
With woodbynd flowers and fragrant eglantine,
So sweet your prison you in time shall prove,
With many deare delights bedecked fyne:
And all thensforth eternall peace shall see
Betweene the Spyder and the gentle Bee.

Epithalamion
Linking Amoretti with the bridal poem Epithalamion are several stanzas telling a mildly erotic story of Cupid and a bee. Epithalamion has 24 stanzas one for each hour of the wedding day. They describe the happy couples delight in all of the arrangements for a perfect wedding day. It is a joyous celebration with each stanza averaging 18 lines fitted to a rhyming scheme. The final stanza has 7 lines which forms a conclusion. The poem hopes for the blessing of children, fidelity and all things good in the marriage. Perhaps he envisioned it not only as a celebration of his marriage, but a poem that could be used to celebrate other marriages.

"The Faerie Queene" is an excellent poem, and this book is an excellent resource for a first read-through, full of excellent notes.

Epic poem. I really like this. Its overly long and there are so many characters you'll definitely get confused and feel lost at times, however there are so many memorable moments. The action scenes are particularly good which seems weird for poetry. Despite magic and monsters there is also an odd amount of realism to many incidents which i enjoyed.
Plus there is plenty of violence and sex which is strange for something which is a self-confessed christian allegory.
Due to its length there is plenty to dig into and i liked it enough to buy a copy despite reading it for free on my ereader.

2nd Read: Ok, not as good as last time. More sexist, classist and obsequious than i remember, also even more allegorical. I'm also starting to suspect Spencer might be a terrible poet, the things he does to the english language, to make words fit the rhyme, are pretty horrific :P .
Still though enough incident to keep things interesting :) .

Read it completely almost fifty years ago. I recall especially the Book of Courtesy, the Sixth Book, with its hero Calidore. I theorized at the time that Courtesy did not fit with the other allegorically systematized virtues. No wonder Spenser found he was concluding his epic before he'd really caught a head of steam to get through his 12 books, the first HALF.
He dedicates his poem to Sir Walter Raleigh, Lieutenant of Cornewayll, saying this a "continued Allegory, or dark conceit...to fashion a gentleman or noble person," his having followed all the ancients, Homer, Virgil and even Ariosto. He began with a "tall, clownishe [contrified] young man" at the Queene's feast who desires an adventure. The Lady saying he must wear the armor she had, for a Christian knight. He put it on, and appeared the goodliest, took on knighthood and mounted a "strange Courser," "where beginneth the first book, viz, 'A gentle knight was pricking on the playne'"(408).

Calidore, for instance, silences the "monstrous Beast" of the thousand tongues,"some were of dogges, that barked day and night,/...And some of Tygres, that did seem to gren,/But most of them were tongues of mortal men,/ That spake reproachfully, not caring where or when."(VI.xii.27) Sounds like Elizabethan Courtesy runs at odds with modern democracy, which depends on reproaches against people in power.
But Calidore silences this monstrous Beast of cacophony-democracy (?!) and breeds politesse, instead of "venemous despite" which Spenser fully expects even for this his epic poem. Backbiting "Ne spareth he the gentle Poets rime, / But rends without regard of person or of time."

As an undergrad I wrote on this poem's prosody, especially the ottava rima concluded by an alexandrine (hexameter). Northrop Frye calls it, "The most remarkably sustained mastery of verbal opsis...which we have to read with a special attention, the abiliaty to catch visualization through sound." Hazlitt says, "His versification is the most smooth and the most sounding in the language. It is a labyrinth of sweet sounds." In fact, I come up against Spenser's beautiful verses for moral ugliness. Possibly Ben Jonson, a verse moralist, found the same, for "Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his matter" (Drummond's bio).
I don't find Frye's opsis, but rather, the sound pursues its own system, attched to the poem much as in a contrapuntal musical composition (Frye calls allegory as here, a "contrapuntal technique" or canonic imitation.) As for alliteration, Frye finds its overuse by characters marking liars and hypocrites (wow--Spiro Agnew never knew this!), as in "But minds of mortal men are muchell mad..."

In his effective verses, the sensual vividness results in a frozen motion:
When on the ground she groveling saw to rowle,
She ran in hast his ife to have bereft:
But ere she could him reach, the sinful sowle
Having his carrion corse quite senseless left,
Was fled to hell, surcharg'd with spoile and theft.
Yet over him she there long gazing stood,
And oft admired his monstrous shape, and oft
His mighty limbs, whilest all with filthy blood
The place there overflowne, seemd like a sodaine flood. (IV.vi.32)

As for the Mutability Cantoes, on the Comet and perhaps the Supernova, changes in the Heavens, Spenser stands clearly against Galileo (sixteen years later) or Giordano Bruno, Spenser's contemporary, who was publishing his 400 pp Latin poem on the Infinite Universe and Innumerable Worlds in 1592, four years before the Fairie Queene.
By sheer happenstance, Bruno and Spenser died around the same year, 1600 and 1599, Spenser four years younger than Bruno. Spenser's last couple years were terrible, for though Yeats would approve that Spenser was driven from Kilcoman his family holdings in North Cork. (Ben Jonson says Spenser lost a daughter when native Irish troops torched the house.)

Read in Oxford Hardback.

This book has stacked underneath it the most extensive amount of lit crit of anything I've ever read, save Shakespeare (maybe!). If Spenser really intended all that everyone say he did, then he is a friggin genius. There are umpteen-thousand pages in this book, but if you give it a go (especially the A.C. Hamilton-edited annotation, paired with his [b:The Spenser Encyclopedia|6945228|The Spenser Encyclopedia|A.C. Hamilton|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266968543s/6945228.jpg|7178989], a tome so massive you could probably murder someone with it), you will learn almost everything you need to know about Elizabethan England, the feudal system that preceded it, and then some, not to mention meeting some strange women with odd genitalia, memorizing the honor code among knights and their passion for horses, and running into a few sprites, nymphs, giants, and other creatures. Based on Hamilton and others, pretty much every single stanza is loaded with allusions and things worth cross-referencing - quite a feat considering how many of them there are.

Oh, and for all you [b:Twilight|41865|Twilight (Twilight, #1)|Stephenie Meyer|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1275613536s/41865.jpg|3212258] fans, the Britomart storyline reads like a teen angsty dream, except for the part where her nurse spits on her to cure her of her love-sickness.

Seeing as Spenser intended six more books in addition to the six he wrote here (seriously), I wonder if that wouldn't have ended up like Quentin Tarentino's third Kill Bill which is rumored to bring back the daughter who saw her mother killed by Uma Thurman. I think the bloody-handed baby sucking the from the dead Amavia was meant to reprise a role in the latter six, if Spenser had been so spirited by his mere pittance from Elizabeth to continue writing. Just my two cents. To carry the Kill Bill comparison further than necessary, this story was pretty epic.

The stanzas make it very easy to take a break from reading every five seconds, but I wouldn't recommend it. Just trudge on through. Despite the intended six more books, the ending is quite satisfying - Spenser has his own personal drama that is almost as entertaining as the book, and is worth looking into especially given the poet's closing remarks. The stories are very visual and intricate. Hamilton's version has an indexed list of characters at the end that is thus very handy. It starts out being hard to read but you can probably get accustomed to the linguistic feats by the end of the first book. Also, look up the word 'puissance', since it seems to come up a lot. Some books are more episodic than others, but of course like every other word in this book, there are more than twenty people who will tell you that there is a good reason for that. Along with Hamilton, some good scholars to read in conjunction with this include Kathryn Schwarz, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean Feerick, Louis Montrose, and Mihoko Suzuki.

I read this for a class and by the end of it I think all of us had gone a little wacky. One of my classmates seemed bent on connecting this book to The Final Destination and something about aliens, regardless of what our highly-esteemed professor had to say. Another friend Justin posted the following Facebook status: "Move over 'Exit pursued by a bear' - bear carrying baby in its mouth has arrived. Three months of Spenser and I finally chuckled out loud. Perhaps that just means that I'm sick, perhaps it means that a bear making off with a baby like it's a pic-a-nic basket is actually funny. Thoughts?" By the end of the semester, we as a class found our sense of humor sickened to appreciable levels, to the point where mutilations, beheadings and bears eating babies were pretty darned hilarious. At least we know how to entertain ourselves.

LB-5

2011 (my review can be found at the LibraryThing post linked)
http://www.librarything.com/topic/120136#2979733

2011 (my review can be found at the LibraryThing post linked)
http://www.librarything.com/topic/120136#2979733

Frightened of the Allegory? With Good Reason

In his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh that now serves as an introduction to the poem Spenser claimed that:

"The General end therefore of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous snd gentle discipline"

From the high sounding tone of the letter it seems to me that Spenser was clear in his mind that he had written (or was going to write) the most important epic poem of the English Renaissance. It harks back to the most popular of books for the gentleman reader: Baldassare Castiglione's [The Book of the Courtier] which had been translated into English some thirty years previously and was still immensely popular. Spenser was just as ambitious for his poem and for his own inspiration and for the edification of his readers he chose to base his poem on the myths of the knight errants of King Arthur's round table. The poem looks backwards rather than forwards and would have appealed to his readers for this very reason. His readers would also be familiar with the use of allegory, as much contemporary printed material and some popular stage plays were still steeped in its usage.

The first three books of the Faerie Queen were published in 1590. With Sponsorship from Sir Walter Raleigh he was able to get the Royal Seal of approval from Elizabeth I which guaranteed its success and obtained for Spenser a pension for life of £50 per year. The fact that Queen Elizabeth I is celebrated as the glorious queen of the faeries throughout the poem probably did not hinder Spenser's ambition.

Some of the reasons for the Faerie Queene's popularity with readers in the late 16th century, no longer hold good for readers today. It is a poem after all and a very long one at that. The whole thing of 6 (or 7 books if you include the Mutabilitie cantos) amounts to over 36000 lines. Spenser's intention was to write 12 books celebrating the adventures of 12 knights for the Christmas feast, some of us may be relieved that he only managed to get to half way. Then there is the allegory, familiar to Spenser's 16th century readers but not for many readers today and so when we are introduced to the very first character with that famous first line "A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine" it is Red Cross who symbolises Holiness; actually he is trying to achieve holiness and so the reader must have this in mind when trying to account for his actions in the story. Allegory is used in other ways; for example when describing the seven sins, they are characterised, here is Gluttony:

And by his side rode loathsome Gluttony,
Deformed creature, on a filthie swyne;
His belly was up-blowne with luxury,
And eke with fatnesse swollen were his eyne,
And like a Crane° his necke was long and fyne,
With which he swallowed up excessive feast,
For want whereof poore people oft did pyne;
And all the way, most like a brutish beast,
He spued up his gorge, that all did him deteast.

However Spenser rarely leaves his readers floundering, he usually tells us who the allegorical figures are or what they represent: at the start of each book we are told the name of the knight and his/her allegorical representation.

Spenser's language is adapted to fit into his poetic rhyming scheme, but this will be familiar to poetry readers, however his language was said to be archaic even by late 16th century standards, but really too much has been made of this and people who have been exposed to other 16th century writing and spelling will have no problem, for others if you can get to grips with the example above of Gluttony then you will enjoy the poem without a lot of trouble.

The epic proportions of the poem, the allegory and the language may be reasons to hesitate before starting in on a long read, but Spenser's Faerie Queene may be worth a little effort for other reasons. The poetry can be sublime and the syntax is not difficult to follow with most lines being end stopped. The poem is made up of nine line stanzas with a regular rhyming scheme and the final line more often than not provides a summary or commentary on the preceding eight lines.

This is an example of Spenser using the popular trope of a ship lost at sea to describe the hopelessness of ill fortune, or restless needs. It is the female knight Britomart the hero of book three, representing chastity;

"For else my feeble vessell crazd and crackt
Through thy strong buffets and outrageous blowes
cannot endure, but needs it must be wrackt
On the rough rocks, or on the sandy shallowes
The while the love it steres, and fortune rows;
Love my lewd pilot hath a restless mind
And fortune Boteswaine no assurance knowes,
But sail withouten starres gainst tide and wind:
How can they other do, sith both are bold and blind?

The battle scenes are inventive and full of action and Spenser's descriptive powers are in evidence throughout. Oh! and there is the eroticism that always seems to be just below the surface but can erupt out into some sensuous stanzas or into the realms of sadomasochism. There are plenty of purple patches but also some longueurs. Spenser saw himself as a historian or more accurately as a poetic historian and so there are some long sequences of stanzas that seem intent on naming all the mythical rulers of ancient England. These of course can be skimmed, but do hark back again to a late medieval feel.

There is no doubt the poem has layers of meaning, however it can be read as a straight forward epic adventure poem about knight errants. Some of the actions of the protagonists may seem strange, but the beauty of the poetry and the action sequences and vivid locations may be of enough interest. The next layer down is the allegory with which I think you need to have some idea to grasp the reasons why the characters do the things that they do. After all the poem is aimed to provide moral instruction and so missing out on this will put a brake on some of the enjoyment. There are also references to the politics of 16th century England and it's history, some of which will remain obscure. Spenser never aimed to be obscure and he is always there to help the reader; he usually speaks directly to the reader in the first two or three stanzas of each canto to set out his main themes or ideas and at the very start of each canto there is a four line synopsis of the canto. The Canto's can be read as separate poems, although characters do appear and reappear throughout the length of the poem the reader never needs to know the back story to make sense of the events.

Some critics have warned about reading too much into Spenser's allegory. The question Did Spenser really mean to say all of this? is pertinent and following through an allegorical, political or philosophical idea can lead to confusion. This is down to the choice of the reader, how much time do you want to spend teasing out possible meanings?

History has not been so very kind to Spenser's faerie Queene. The Cambridge History of English literature says:

"He tried to do too many things at once. and, in elaborating intellectually the allegorical plot he has confused the imaginative substance of the poetic narrative........ Spenser tried to tell his lies while clinging to a disabling kind of truth and so he does not convince his readers. He lives as an exquisite word-painter of widely different scenes and as supreme poet-musician using with unrivalled skill a noble stanza of his own invention. unparalleled in any other language"

This summary misses the excitement of the action and the underlying eroticism that lingers in the story telling. To my way of thinking Spenser has taken us into a wonderful world of faerie land, which sometimes resembles the real world too uncomfortably. It is a long poem with some passages more exciting and entertaining than others, however with a little knowledge of the allegorical structure the poem takes on another life and the reader can easily become absorbed. It is a 5 star read of course as there is nothing like it, but at times it can feel like a three star read.

The most beautiful books I have ever owned, and among the best

Finished this one for a class. Although one of my favorite classes, Spenser's work was tough to get through. Immensely arrogant and dense.

Brilliant stuff, really.

Here's what the triumph of Temperaunce over hedonism looks like:

But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue,
Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse;
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue
Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse,
But that their blisse he turn'd to balefulnesse:
Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface,
Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse,
Their banket houses burne, their buildings race,
And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place.

Only a knight who is exceedingly temperate and has good counsel could do this. Read Spenser to know how one such knight proved to be equal to the task and who advised him.

Truly spoke Robert Fripp: "To be happy with what you have you have to be happy with what you have to be happy with."

The all too often forgotten epic poem. The action and characters are far more enjoyable than those found in Beowulf.

The greatest poetical work in English (published 1579) since Chaucer’s Canterbury tales written some two centuries earlier - well Spenser certainly thought so and I am inclined to agree. It is a cycle of twelve pastoral poems known classically as eclogues and Spenser’s grand vision tied each one to the months of the year. Characters dip in and out of the poems whose central character Colin Clout dips out more than he dips in, but his influence if felt throughout the cycle giving the whole thing a sense of unity. Spenser had it in mind to go on to write the great English epic poem and he largely succeeded with the Faerie Queen (he never finished it, but then Chaucer didn’t finish The Canterbury Tales) and The Shepheardes Calender he saw as his apprentice work. The Latin poet Virgil had written his eclogues as his first serious attempts at poetry and Spenser always with an eye on his place in the poetical canon followed suite and told his readers that this was exactly what he was doing.

In my opinion the grand theme; the raison d’etre if you like of the poem is poetry itself; its importance, and the difficulties the poet faces in making it so. Of course the Shepheardes Calender is ostensibly about many other issues and themes and at its most simple level it is the old story of unrequited love. We meet young Colin Clout in the January eclogue and he is already suffering. He issues forth with his complaint which he compares with the miserable January weather:

"Such rage as winter's reigneth in my heart,
My life-blood freezing with unkindly cold;
Such stormy stoures do breed my baleful smart,
As if my year were waste and waxen old;
And yet, alas! but now my spring begun,
And yet, alas! it is already done.

"All so my lustful leaf is dry and sere,
My timely buds with wailing all are wasted;
The blossom which my branch of youth did bear,
With breathed sighs is blown away and blasted;
And from mine eyes the drizzling tears descend,
As on your boughs the icicles depend.”

A major theme of much Renaissance poetry is man’s complaint about the pain he suffers from his unsuccessful attempt to woo the woman of his dreams. It was the major theme of Courtly Love Poetry and as much of the poetry was written by Courtiers, or men very close to the Royal Family then the audience for Spenser’s first poem would have been very familiar with the theme and for Spenser it puts him right at the heart of poetic tradition. Spenser however was a whole lot more ambitious and he explains this in an epistle attached to the start of the poem written by one E. K. and the mystery attributed to the Calender starts there.

E. K. could have been Edward Kirke a contemporary and probable friend of Spenser, but there is much speculation that the epistle and the glosses were written in collaboration with Spenser himself. Much of what Spenser would have wanted to say is contained in this epistle. He is referred to as a ‘new poet’ who ‘still has the sounds of those ancient poets ringing in his ears’. His use of some archaic language brings ‘authority to the verse’ and of course reinforces his connections with the poets of the past particularly Chaucer. E. K. goes on to say that he has added a certain gloss (footnotes) for the exposition of old words and harder phrases. He tells us this is a story of a man who has long wandered in the ‘labyrinth of love’ and now has time as an older man to ‘mitigate and allay the heat of his passion’ and to warn the young shepherds his equals and companions of his unfortunate folly, and Colin Clout is the name under which the ‘authors name is shadowed’. Spenser published the poem under a pseudonym, but as manuscript copies of the poems would have been circulated to friends before publication it was an open secret as to identity of the author and E. K. tells us that his name will soon become well known.

The epistle provides the launching pad for Spenser to write about poetry: a theme that has occupied many poets throughout the ages; from Chaucer to Wordsworth and on up to Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. They wrestle with the problem of how to define poetical inspiration, where does it come from, how can it be harnessed, how can it be expressed on paper, are poets the teachers or guardians of other peoples souls? do they have a moral duty? Who should take care of the poets and in Spenser’s case particularly, who should provide the patronage or the money to allow the poet to practice his calling. These issues are touched on throughout The Calender from the moment in the first eclogue when Colin Clout throws down his shepherds pipe while suffering the pangs of love. The whole of the October Eclogue is based around the question of what makes good poetry: Cuddie a young poet expresses his woes to his elder compatriot Piers:

Piers, I have piped erst so long with pain,
That all mine oaten reeds be rent and wore,
And my poor Muse hath spent her spared store,
Yet little good hath got, and much less gain.
Such pleasance makes the grasshopper so poor,
And lig so laid, when winter doth her strain.

Spenser uses the idea of the shepherd’s songs of which Colin Clout is the revered master among his contemporaries to stand for poetry.

Spenser’s appeal for patronage would have been clear to his contemporary readers, but the political aspects of his Calender stretch much further than this. As a Courtier it was important for Spenser to seek the attention of the rising factions at Queen Elizabeth’s court, but he also had to heap praise on the queen herself and these two ideals were not always the same and so a careful line needed to be trod. The purpose of the April eclogue was to honour and praise the most Sovereign Queen Elizabeth and he does this, praising her to the skies to such an extent he imagines her as the fourth Grace taking her place amongst the saints in heaven. However Colin/Spenser does not directly sing these fourteen stanzas himself, Colin has retired from the company of other shepherds and it is left to his friend Hobbinol to recall Colins famous song while in conversation with his fellow shepherd Thenot. The big issue for Queen and country in 1579 when the poem was published was a proposal that Elizabeth might marry the Catholic French Duke of Alencon. Spenser would have been concerned not to give unwanted advice especially as a pamphlet on the subject recently published had resulted in the author and his publishers being condemned to having their right hands severed in an all too public ceremony. The political aspects of the poem have fascinated more modern critics and there has been speculation that Rosalind the lady who spurns Colin Clout’s love is also Queen Elizabeth.

The poem takes stock of the religious controversy of the Tudor Court and Elizabeth’s religious settlement in favour of the protestants hangs over some of the eclogues. The May eclogue features a debate between two pasteurs/pastors: Piers the protestant and Palinode the catholic on how the youth should be educated. In May time the sap has definitely risen and Palinode is wishing he could join in the abundant May time celebrations:

O that I were there,
To helpen the ladies their Maybush bear!

Piers reprimands Palinode saying that the frolicking shepherds are leaving their flocks unattended. It is the Shepherds job to educate the young and curb their foolish pleasures.

The poems concern is with the nature of human life and Spenser’s vision of linking the changing seasons with the life of Colin Clout from his reflections on youth in January to his thoughts on death in December is a masterstroke. Throughout the poem there is a dialogue between youth and age, town and country, protestant and catholic, bucolic life in an Arcadia of the classicists and current political machinations. Spenser’s use of the classical eclogue format placing his poem in a pastoral setting hankering after a vision of a golden age contrasts with the realities of modern (Tudor) life.

The poem after repeated readings seems to have a life of its own; always a sign of a great work of art and this is because of: the variety of the eclogues themselves, the lively debates, the characters of the shepherds, that appear and reappear throughout the seasons, the stories within stories and of course some sublime versifying by Spenser. But let me take you through some of my favourite months. February is described by E. K. in his gloss as a moral tale. It takes the form of a debate between Thenot an old shepherd (90 years old he claims) and Cuddie a young man who is not prepared to listen to any advice; he has the knowledge of Youth. Thenot tells a delightful story of two trees on top of a hill; an ancient grand old oak tree that is now suffering from disease and a young Briar tree that is fighting the oak for light and water. The Briar tree complains vociferously to the goodman farmer who is seduced by the succulent young foliage and flowers and runs home to get his axe. After a struggle he chops down the oak tree with disastrous results, but young Cuddie has the last word saying he has wasted his day listening to old Thenot. Spenser tells the story in ten syllable rhyming couplets. The August eclogue features a song competition between Willie and Perigot. Willie says he is sorrowful because he has learned a new dance and it is not a good one; he is referring to his new love which has misled himself and his children. They agree that the competition should take the form of Willie inventing the first line and Perigot supplying the next. The whole thing develops into a call and response idiom that reaches back to old folk songs or troubadours lays:

……………………….
PER. As the bonilass passed by,
WIL. Hey, ho, bonilass!
PER. She rov'd at me with glancing eye,
WIL. As clear as the crystal glass:
PER. All as the sunny beam so bright,
WIL. Hey, ho, the sun-beam!
PER. Glanceth from Phœbus' face forthright,
WIL. So love into thy heart did stream:
PER. Or as the thunder cleaves the clouds,
WIL. Hey, ho, the thunder!
PER. Wherein the lightsome levin shrouds,
WIL. So cleaves thy soul asunder:
PER. Or as Dame Cynthia's silver ray,
WIL. Hey, ho, the moonlight!
PER. Upon the glittering wave doth play,
WIL. Such play is a piteous plight.
PER. The glance into my heart did glide,
WIL. Hey, ho, the glider!
PER. Therewith my soul was sharply gryde,
WIL. Such wounds soon waxen wider.
……………………………………

Cuddie decides that honours are even but ends with a song that he has learned from Colin Clout. It is Colin in the depths of despair still pining for his beloved Rosalind.

Colin himself returns for the November eclogue and it is an elegy to love. He forsees his death and is reflecting on his misery, and he makes a song about the death of Dido and her lover Lobbin, but his song/poem has a turn around when he lights on the idea that death is perhaps not the end. Here are two verses from the middle of the poem:

O trustless state of earthly things, and slipper hope
Of mortal men, that swink and sweat for nought,
And, shooting wide, doth miss the marked scope;
Now have I learn'd (a lesson dearly bought)
That n'is on earth assurance to be sought;
For what might be in earthly mould,
That did her buried body hold?
O heavy herse!
Yet saw I on the bier when it was brought;
O careful verse!

"But maugre Death, and dreaded Sisters' deadly spite,
And gates of hell, and fiery Furies' force,
She hath the bonds broke of eternal night,
Her soul unbodied of the burdenous corse.
Why then weeps Lobbin so without remorse?
O Lobb! thy loss no longer lament;
Dido is dead, but into heaven hent.
O happy herse!
Cease now, my Muse, now cease thy sorrows' source,
O joyful verse!

In the December eclogue Colin faces his own death and sums up his life in relation to the seasons. There is remorse but no bitterness in his final verse I think:

"Adieu, delights, that lulled me asleep;
Adieu, my dear, whose love I bought so dear;
Adieu, my little lambs and loved sheep;
Adieu, ye woods, that oft my witness were:
Adieu, good Hobbinol, that was so true,
Tell Rosalind, her Colin bids her adieu.”

Edmund Spenser is not an easy poet to read and for the modern reader he demands some work to appreciate his verse. His use of allegory in the Callender is not so difficult to work out; the shepherds could be pastors, politicians, poets or other leaders while the flock are the uneducated masses that need to be led. What is difficult is Spenser’s use of archaic language and the footnotes or glosses supplied by E. K. raise more questions than they give answers. It would also be useful to have an understanding of why Spenser chose to use a pastoral setting for his poem and so an acquaintance with the classics would be an advantage. Having said all that there is some sublime poetry here and the sounds the words make, the stories they tell and the variety of voices used will entrance any reader willing to meet it half way. Spenser was correct in believing he had written a masterpiece 5 stars.

Guyon (Temperance) and his Palmer (who tells Guyon what temperance is) are often boring, but the House of Temperance and Prince Arthur are stunning and many of the temptations are beautiful. I love Spenser's interjections--he invokes and praises Queen Elizabeth ("To decke my song withall, I would assay / Thy name, O Soveraine Queene, to blazon farre away") and seems to admit Guyon is a bit dull ("here I a while must stay / to see a cruell fight doen by the Prince this day" he says before devoting Canto 11 to Arthur). One of my favorite stanzas is about Arthur's quest for Gloriana, which brings him to each of Spenser's books:

Certes (then said the Prince) I God avow,
That sith I armes and knighthood first did plight,
My whole desire hath beene, and yet is now,
To serve that Queene with all my power and might.
Now hath the Sunne with his lamp-burning light,
Walkt round about the world, and I no less,
Sith of that Goddess I have sought the sight,
Yet no where can her find; such happiness
Heaven doth to me envy, and fortune favour lesse.

Arthurian knights each of whom is emblematic of some virtue or other wander around a landscape fighting bad guys or sometimes just fighting for no apparent reason. Sometimes they rescue damsels in distress, some of the good and bad knights are damsels themselves. Various storylines come together and get wound up others are left hanging but presumably would have been wound up if Spenser had ever got round to writing the second half. Even as it is, it's too much to grasp in one reading, but I really don't feel up to reading the whole thing again.½

To me, this is the great long poem in English, beside which Paradise Lost seems like a clumsy haiku. Where Milton is precise and sententious, Spenser is exuberant, almost mad, and always focused on sheer reading pleasure. His aim is to take you on a crazed sword-and-sorcery epic, and his style combines godlike verbal inventiveness with the sort of eye for lurid details that an HBO commissioning editor would kill for.

It's almost like fan fiction. One imagines Spenser getting high over his copy of Malory one night, and then falling asleep and having a feverish opium dream about it. The Faerie Queene is the result: errant knights, evil witches and dragons, cross-dressing heroes, splenetic deities, and lots of damsels who get tied up in becomingly abbreviated outfits to await rescue. Despite this list of clichés, though, Spenser can also be fascinatingly transgressive, especially when it comes to gender roles: women in the Faerie Queene are by no means all passive weaklings, and there are no fewer than two different ‘warrior maids’ who ride around in full armour kicking the shit out of people who question their sense of agency or look at them funny. Note also the intriguing walk-on parts such as the giantess Argantè, who keeps men locked up ‘to serve her lust’ – a nice inversion of the usual trope of women being carted off as sexual prizes – and who is moreover defeated by the female knight Palladine.

Incidentally, Spenser likes to come up with inventive perversions to characterise his villains: Argantè is accused of prenatal incest, which I have to admit was a new one on me:

These twinnes, men say, (a thing far passing thought)
While in their mothers wombe enclosd they were,
Ere they into the lightsom world were brought,
In fleshly lust were mingled both yfere,
And in that monstrous wise did to the world appere.

I don't think enough has been written about Spenser's language. There is a tendency for modern readers to gloss over the tricky bits, and think: ‘Well, presumably this was an easy read back in the 1590s.’ It really wasn't. Spenser's language was, even to his contemporaries, extremely archaic and convoluted, with a distinct taste for inventive coinages. It's like a kind of Elizabethan Clockwork Orange (A Clockwork Potato?). Some of this is now invisible to modern readers. Words like amazement, amenable, bland, blatant, bouncing, centered, discontent, dismay, elope, formerly, gurgling, horrid, invulnerable, jovial, lawlessness, memorize, newsman, Olympic, pallid, red-handed, sarcasm, transfix, unassailable, violin, warmonger – all of them, and hundreds more, seem uncomplicated now, but that is only because Spenser invented them and we have become used to them in the centuries since. This is not to mention the hundreds of other words he coined that did not catch on and have now become obsolete (there's another).

I particularly like his flair for euphemism. Here's another awesome section, where a hapless husband has tracked down his wife after she was kidnapped by a group of satyrs. He hides nearby in the bushes, only to find out that she's actually having quite a good time:

At night, when all they went to sleepe, he vewd,
Whereas his louely wife emongst them lay,
Embraced of a Satyre rough and rude,
Who all the night did minde his ioyous play:
Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day,
That all his hart with gealosie did swell…

‘Come aloft’ of course meaning something along the lines of ‘mount sexually’. There's a lot of this kind of thing – Spenser not always coming across as the most secure guy in the world. The stanza concludes with another fun figurative flourish:

But yet that nights ensample did bewray,
That not for nought his wife them loued so well,
When one so oft a night did ring his matins bell.

Haha. Love it. This form of stanza – now known as ‘Spenserian’ – was his own creation, and the way each one concludes in a jaunty rhyming couplet makes him very quotable. I actually wrote this bit out in a notebook more than two years ago, which shows how long I've been reading this – it's been a sort of long-term project that I've dipped in and out of in between other books. This makes it hard to review, because I've now long forgotten half the stuff that happened in the first couple of sections. (Indeed when I started reading it, I was using a version on the internet, but I fell in love with the poem so hard that I ended up buying a luxury Folio Society limited edition bound in goatskin, probably the most expensive book in my entire collection – which, as Hannah was not slow to point out, seems hard to justify for a poem that you can read online for free.)

So OK, the paperback looks incredibly dull and imposing, and, yes, the idea of a 1500-page allegorical poem about Queen Elizabeth I does sound like a living nightmare – but The Faerie Queene is the opposite of boring. It's pure incident from start to finish. And if there's a message to the epic, taken as a whole, I think Spenser's closing lines point us in the right direction. He shows us that what matters in this world is not money or power – nor even, in the final analysis, the virtues that he has been exploring for nearly 40,000 lines. What matters is taking the time to find pleasure – in love, in knowledge, and, most of all, in literature:

Therefore do you, my rimes, keep better measure,
And seeke to please; that now is counted wise mens threasure.½

This is actually a great story, even with all the morality and religious undertones, it is really well written, and I am really happy I had to read this for class. Will definitely check out more of the Fairie Quene later!

The style is amazing, how can someone write a long story in poem form, with the stanzas always the same, with both end-rhyme and alliteration? And it is also really good to see where some inspiration for contemporary books must have come from.

This is the beginning of all the cool books that are being published today IMO. There are fairies, morality lessons, bad characters pretending to be good, a quest, love - it has it all!

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2029672.html

This is one of the curiosities of the English language, a long poem written in its own peculiar verse structure in which archetypal figures based on myths of many different origins contend for mastery of spoils, women and virtue in a fantasy landscape which resembles the north of County Cork. Some of the allegory is pretty straightforward, as when Prince Arthur springs to the defence of the cruelly oppressed lady Belge; other parts are more layered and/or obscure.

It has taken me five months to read this. I found I could not proceed faster than one canto every day, and on many days I did not manage any cantos at all; and there are 74 of them, plus the proems and the two concluding verses. It's not that it is particularly difficult to read, compared even to Shakespeare; the style is generally consistent, and a good edition (mine is the Longman edited by A.C. Hamilton) helps you through the more obscure words or usages. But it's dense and moves both rather slowly and rather fast at the same time.

I found that one of the biggest barriers to my understanding of the poem was Tolkien. Spenser writes of elves and dwarves in a parallel fantasy world, but these are not Tolkien's separate races; the elves are effectively just a fantasy nationality, and the dwarves just short guys (who tend to appear as servants). I was also subliminally expecting some Big Bad villain, but in fact we have a chain of more or less loosely connected stories, with the main linking character Prince Arthur, who is intended to be King Arthur (and yet didn't fit for me too well into my own vision of Arthurian legend). So I found myself unnecessarily distracted by my attempts to fit it into fantasy genres with which I am more familiar.

What does come over with extraordinary vigour is Spenser's love of the Irish landscape. Subsequent history shows him as one of the many adventurers who descended on Munster to occupy land confiscated from the Desmonds and their affiliates, who then lost it all in a subsequent rebellion; it's worth being reminded that from Spenser's point of view, he had come to stay, and expected his descendants to live on at Kilcolman for many generations. County Cork was his home and the focus of his imagination. It's not too difficult to believe that he died essentially of a broken heart after losing it all.

As for the actual meaning of it all: I think it is possible to over-analyze. Sometimes the allusions are pretty obvious, or indeed the description may be pretty much what it appears to be (thinking for instance of the house whose chambers correspond to organs of the human body, or the personified rivers of Britain and Ireland). The only one of the six virtues where Spenser has much interesting to show about the virtue itself, for my money, was Courtesy; I felt he let his pen wander aside from the point as his fancy took him elsewhere. The best character in it is Britomart, who is obviously the model for George R.R. Martin's Brienne of Tarth.

And there's a robot.

Of all of the classic English literature that I have read, The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser is among my favorites. The funny thing is, I don't have that much love for reading poetry (I can appreciate it for it's merits, but it's normally not my cup of tea,) but I thoroughly enjoyed this book length poem.

The main story is of the Redcrosse Knight and his lady love Una, a princess who has asked her betrothed to rid the kingdom of a terrible dragon. Along the way they must face many challenges (and much allegory,) which makes for quite an entertaining tale. My favorite part of the story is the Redcrosse Knight's experiences in the House of Pride.

Overall, this is a rich allegorical tale full of knights, princesses, and evil creatures of myth and legend all written in a beautifully constructed verse that flows wonderfully. I haven't read any of the other books of the Faerie Queene, but Book 1 was fantastic.