Navoi innovation university faculty of philology and language teaching

CONCULUSION
The Shephearde’s Calendar was Spenser's first important work, published anonymously in 1579. It consists of twelve pastoral poems, one for each month of the year, which sing laments of unrequited love, praise Queen Elizabeth and satirise the corruptions of the Church. Under the guise of writing pastoral poetry, Spenser attacked religious abuse and the lack of support for the literature of his day.
His speakers are countrymen who use archaic and rustic language. In this regard he follows the example of the Greek Theocritus, writing in third century B.C. Sicily, and Roman Virgil, in the first century B.C., whose Eclogues contain dialogues between shepherds, shepherdesses and other rustic figures.
Theocritus is considered the originator of pastoral poetry. About thirty of his idylls survive. They portray rural life in Sicily in the form of dialogues and songs.
In the century following Spenser, John Milton continued to be influenced by Greek and Roman poetry. His elegy Lycidas, in memory of his friend Edward King, is often regarded as one of the greatest English lyric poems.
The collection of moralizing, melancholy verse titled Complaints reflects an as yet not fully developed artistry in the author. Although published in the aftermath of fame brought by The Faerie Queene, most of the nine poems were probably first drafted much earlier. The most significant poem in this volume was probably the satirical beast fable, “Prosopopoia: Or, Mother Hubberd’s Tale.” Following the tradition of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, the poet creates a framework of tale-tellers, one of whom is “a good old woman” named Mother Hubberd. In Mother Hubberd’s story, a Fox and an Ape gain personal prosperity through the gullibility of farmers, the ignorance and worldliness of clergymen, and the licentiousness of courtiers. About two thirds of the way through, the satire turns more specifically to the concern of England in1579 with a possible marriage between the twenty-four-year-old Duc d’Alencon and Queen Elizabeth, then forty-six. The marriage was being engineered by Lord Burleigh (the Fox of the narrative) and by Jean de Simier, whom Elizabeth playfully called her “Ape.” This poem, even more than The Shepheardes Calender, demonstrates Spenser’s artistic simplicity and the Chaucer-like irony of his worldview. Burleigh’s later hostility to Spenser gives evidence of the pointedness of the poet’s satiric barbs. “Virgil’s Gnat”also exemplifies a satiric beast fable, this time with Leicester’s marriage as the target, hit so effectively that Spenser himself was wounded by Leicester’s lessened patronage. In “Muiopotmos: Or, The Fate of the Butterfly,” beast fable is elevated by philosophical overtones, epic machinery, and classical allusions. Some type of personal or political allegory obviously underlies the poem, but critical interpretations vary widely in attempting to identify the chief figures, the Spider and the Butterfly. Despite such uncertainty, however, one message is clear: Life and beauty are mutable.
Mutability permeates Complaints; it is even more central to the posthumous fragment known as the “Mutabilitie Cantos.” The publisher Matthew Lownes printed these two cantos as “The Legend of Constancy,” a fragmentary book 7 of The Faerie Queene. Lownes’s identification of these two cantos with the unfinished epic was apparently based on similar poetic form, an allusion to the poet’s softening his stern style in singing of hills and woods “mongst warres and knights,” and a reference to the records of Fairy-land as registering mutability’s genealogy. There are, however, no knights, human orelf, in these cantos. Instead, Jove and Nature represent allegorically the cosmic principle of Constancy, the permanence that underlies all change. Despite the philosophical victory of Nature, one of the most effective extended passages in the cantos represents change through a processional pageant of the seasons, the months, day and night, the hours, and life and death.
The principle of underlying permanence applies to Spenser’s works as well as to the world of which he wrote. In his shepherds and shepherdesses, his knights and ladies, his own personae, and even in the animal figures of his fables, images of Everyman and Everywoman still live. Time has thickened some of the allegorical veils that conceal as well as reveal, language then new has become archaic, and poetic conventions have be-come freer since Spenser’s poetry first charmed his contemporaries. Despite such changes, however, the evocative and creative power that made Spenser “the Prince of Poets in his time” remains constant.

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