Navoi innovation university faculty of philology and language teaching

Edmund spenser novels and its philosopic meaning

The poem takes place late in the day, and a windy day too. The two speakers take a while before they reach an accord. Diggon is bitter, he is politicized in an embarrassing way. Hobbinol, not encountering the expected discourse, needs to turn things this way and that before he can settle. He is (not very flatteringly) portrayed as a timorous, conventional stay-at-home who at first does not understand the sharp discourse of Diggon, and when he does understand it is afraid of such plain speaking. But they gradually come together through the fable (which is oddly told in the wrong order); as if they smile over Lowder as a real dog, and it brings them together. After automatically lamenting his inability to offer any real help, Hobbinol is able to produce a resolution by offering Diggon a bed to sleep on. But Diggon has to shelve his uncompromising radicalism and give vent to his (more socially acceptable) personal distress before this sympathetic resolution can be achieved. October. Six-line stanzas, regularly iambic, a5b5b5a5b5a5.
This poem, about the sustenance of poetry, is subtly and multiply linked to its month: the month of harvest and of vintage, but also the month when the sun is perceptibly losing strength and we feel bareness around us.
It so happens that I'm writing this in October, watching the shops gain vigour and fullness with the autumn season. Oh, how wonderful and fecund all the products seem! The impossible variety of the books in Waterstones, all so eminently worth reading! Really, we don't give enough credit to anything. Why, the piped music itself: how long it is since I remembered Elvis Costello, or Talking Heads - what buried treasures in the recent past, how acclaimed those album sequences once were, I never liked them enough but I still ended up owning some of those 5-star-review albums for a while - and now? In this consumer ecstasy, walking around like an animated Mojo magazine, there is something profoundly attractive in the thought of spending time - much more time - with Spenser's poetry. Yet you can no more find the Shepheard's Calender in Waterstones than you can find Allen Fisher or Caroline Bergvall - I checked. (Disconcerting, seeing Tao Lin on the displays.)
So the rural harvest has morphed into This Year's Model, but the seasonal rhythm remains. It's salutary to check my inner criticism of Spenser for not being a genuine shepherd, for dressing up his versifying pals in fake pastoral garb, and to remember that we readers of Spenser are not shepherds either. The poem is an artificial meeting-place, but its seasons are still real. And curiously I find the poems in the Shepheardes Calender quite convincingly naturalistic. There is weather and labour in the grain of the verse, there's a largeness in Spenser's realization of pastoral, it has not yet refined into Herrick (or indeed Sidney). Maybe that has something to do with the bishops - i.e. with a background in work, even if it wasn't rural work.
The Shepheard's Calender was also a seminal consumer item. Never before had the marketing department distinguished itself so explicitly from the poet who was (tantalizingly) said to be so reluctant to "promulgate". What came on sale in 1579 was not just verse, it was the experience of discovering a poet. It was the experience of owning a bit of cultural history with a great sleeve, just like Talking Heads '77.
October deliberately outruns its course. After setting forth a mounting (Virgilian) progress into epic, climaxing with O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place? (79) it gestures at moving upward to the stars, goes off at a tangent meditating on Colin’s passions and poetic capacities, and then rejects servitude to love; instead, Cuddie proposes drinking as the obvious way to generate lofty verse. This is unserious, and descends just as inconsequentially into the quietism of For thy, content vs in thys humble shade: Where no such troublous tydes han vs assayde, Here we our slender pipes may safely charme. (116-18)
The resolution, as of the other poems, is tranquil, certainly, but not precisely a matter for rejoicing – it is not the best, but only making the best.
The frame is mainly a5b5a5b5:b5c5b5c5:c5d5c5d5 etc. The elaborate verses on Dido are mainly a6b5a5b5b5c4c4d2b5d2, but with some irregularities (e.g. c5 at line 79).
Where bene the nosegayes that she dight for thee:
The colourd chaplets wrought with a chiefe,
The knotted rushrings, and gilte Rosemaree?
For shee deemed nothing too deere for thee.
Thereof nought remaynes but the memoree... (114-17, 121)
The rhythm of the rest of the Dido ode is regularly iambic, but this stanza is bumpy. “Wrought” was perhaps intended to be “wroughten” – this line is a syllable short. The other irregular lines (117, 121) are at least decasyllabic, and could be made semi-regular with some cunning placement of accents, e.g. on “no thing” (defensible) and “remaynes” (doubtful).
I care very little for the Dido ode. The long stanza and the altering refrain (from “O heauie herse” to “O happye herse”) bring to mind later triumphs; but what works in a marriage poem seems glib in a funeral poem. Colin’s epanorthoses, though admired by E.K., are also unappealing to me:
Why doe we longer liue, (ah why liue we so long)
She while she was, (that was, a woful word to sayne)
They are a formal but strikingly crude way of registering emotion; the self-interruption marks passion’s impatience with the ongoing process of speech. Even more crude is the piling up of the vocabulary of “grieslie ghostes”, “streaming teares”, dolefulness and woefulness.
Spenser wrote other poems that can be loosely called elegies, Daphnaida and Astrophel. More accurately they should be called doleful plaints. None of them appears to owe its origin to a personal or deeply felt sense of bereavement; they are not really poems about death. Perhaps it’s significant that The Faerie Queene was perfectly designed to be an enormous poem from which death is markedly absent. What Spenser is poetically sensitive to is not death but mutability. He generalizes and universalizes instinctively – December is a good example of where this can take us.
December mentions death, as what comes after – “dreerie” but “timely”. This is true in the sense that the fiction comes to an end with the poem. It isn’t true in the sense that Colin is really old, drawing near his latter end, or about to drop down dead. The only thing that’s really going to die, we suspect, is Colin’s attachment to Rosalind.⁵
The poem is a calendar within a calendar. Spenser felt the form deeply, and he used it at the other end of his poetic career in the Mutabilitie cantos – but there he worked from March to February, according to the old idea of when the year started and finished.
His use of it here is complicated. The year’s cycle, from spring to winter, is used as a figure, both of Colin’s love affair (innocence, passion, waste, decay) and of his whole life (youth, manhood, ripeness, age). He is actually singing the song in December, which is imagined both as a long-distant spring (or rather, Colin’s youthful spring extended even to pre-Christmas occupations such as gathering nuts) and as the present onset of winter. A similar complication applies to summer, when his fatal passion has overpowered and alienated him, yet at the same time his skills and achievements continue to expand. But Colin’s knowledge (e.g. of the heavens) will only result in making him more capable of autumnally reckoning his own failure. At some level this allows into the poem a Christian (and Hamlet-like) figuring of the imperfection of man’s triumphs. December in England is, more than any other month, associated with a Christian festival – it’s almost unimaginable without Christmas. Thus the poem very subtly hints at a renunciation of earthly love and the possible birth of spiritual love, as in the Foure Hymnes.
The final stanzas are pleasingly naive. This naivety has been an intermittent feature throughout the Calender, something that E.K. has been keen to annotate as suitable to a pastoral venture. Its function at the end is surely to detach us from too close an identification with Colin – his fictiveness is underlined. Behind him we hear, perhaps, the voice of the poet announcing the end of his country pantomime:
Adieu delightes, that lulled me asleepe, Adieu my deare, whose loue I bought so deare: Adieu my little Lambes and loued sheepe, Adieu ye Woodes that oft my witnesse were: Adieu good Hobbinol, that was so true, Tell Rosalind, her Colin bids her adieu.
For Colin and Rosalind it really is over, but not for the poem or for the life in which it will find its function, both of them cycling around the calendar for ever, as the Epilogue points out.
Many readers have assumed that E.K. is Spenser himself. They find it difficult to believe that an unknown poet could persuade anyone else to take the time to write elaborate commentary, and they think Spenser was greatly puffed – in fact, altogether too conveniently – by commentary that already treats his work as canonical, i.e in the opposite spirit to what is implied by Spenser's modest pen-name Immeritô.
Our inability to resolve this simple matter tells us a good deal about how elusive Spenser remains as a personality. References to E.K in the Spenser-Harvey letters do not help, as they can be read equally well either as reflecting Spenser’s somewhat mixed feelings about his real-life commentator or as Spenser indulging in some comic elaboration of his invented persona. If you think that E.K. is a Spenserian fiction, you may find it significant that Harvey does not trouble to respond to the invitation to refer to E.K. or to pass on any greeting to him.
Nevertheless, though intermittently tempted by the “E.K.=Spenser” theory I currently side with C.S. Lewis (and Selincourt) in judging that E.K. was a real person, independent from Spenser. Richard McCabe’s remark on the first page of his 1999 edition of the shorter poems (“a literary agent too ideal to be other than fictitious”) reflects a simple lack of historical awareness – and he surely ought to have found room in the next 750 pages to address this important question in a little more detail. It might be true that no new poet today can find a peer prepared to subordinate themselves to close commentary mingled with outbursts of uncritical acclamation (counter-examples occur to me), but anyway in 1579 everything was different, and besides Spenser wasn’t exactly unknown. Unknown poets can’t find illustrators either, but that’s what Spenser ended up with; good ones, who read his poems carefully.